


Barricade Methods

by inconsequentialvrb



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types
Genre: Abuse, Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, Drama, Foster Kid Ed, Holy shit i did a high school au, Hurt/Comfort, Irresponsible use of pharmaceuticals, Other, Six humunculi are foster siblings from hell, Substance Abuse
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-19
Updated: 2021-02-17
Packaged: 2021-03-05 02:07:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 13
Words: 134,942
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25386550
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inconsequentialvrb/pseuds/inconsequentialvrb
Summary: This is what he gets for developing a totally-mild crush on an asshole who’d probably take him to prom just so he could dump a bucket of pig’s blood on his head.
Relationships: Chris "Madam Christmas" Mustang & Roy Mustang, Edward Elric & Greed, Edward Elric & Winry Rockbell, Edward Elric/Roy Mustang
Comments: 168
Kudos: 131





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> y’all remember being a kid? That was messed up. 
> 
> An AU fic I never thought I'd do. This is all a direct result of my unyielding hunger for angst and misery; tragedy and trauma ™, because of which I urge you to proceed with caution (or jump ship now) if you have a problem with any of the following: heavy slurs, implied child abuse, mentions of fire-related injuries as well as many flashbacks to said events, and last but not least, ongoing Carrie references that'll be further explored in the chapters to come (I am sorry). 
> 
> Enjoy! :-)

8:22 am 

The automated beast that goes by the guise of a coffee machine spurts what sounds like a thousand screeching cries from the underworld. Ed tightens his grip around the power cord before it spits out the last of its scalding brew onto the cracked porcelain cup underneath and then — in a pretty unwise move — yanks it out of the socket with a sharp sigh of — what, relief? 

It may be too early in the morning to figure out what his compost heap of a brain intended by it. He only knows this coffee maker is older than what Archimedes would be if he still lived, getting assisted sponge baths out in some run-down asylum, and it makes him real antsy. 

“You’re pushing thirty, Weston! C’mon” He yells towards the stairs, “M’not waiting on you today.” 

Punctuated stomps enter the kitchen and he braces himself. He's showered in amateur insults by a muffled voice, a mouth filled with inflated corn and residual milk. 

“The name’s _Wolf,_ _idiot_. Wolf!” The kid spits and shoves past him to throw his cereal bowl into the heap of grimy dishes behind him. Ed narrowly avoids spilling boiled coffee on his already gnarly-ass, fucked-up hand. He’s getting down the list of ridiculously incorrect names that start with ‘W’— Wyatt, Winston, Walter, Wayne. 

This is barely the beginning for the purple-contacts-goth hyperactive infant he’s got to live with till he's eighteen. 

“Whatever, get your shit." He tells him. "You can’t miss the bus again; this area’s brimmin' with walrus mustache guys.” He cautiously sips on his coffee as Wyly huffs, grateful about keeping his reference to lurking pedophiles cryptic enough that the kid probably and assumes it’s something to do with the general unpleasantness of facial hair. 

“Nah, you’re just afraid that she’s gunna bust you again for not taking care of me,” He slides into his view and goes for what he probably thinks is the scariest grin ever mustered. It pulls his face so widely Ed can get a glimpse of the gaps where baby teeth used to be. 

He shoots back a sardonic smirk and swings the messenger bag over his opposite shoulder. Wolf — or Wes, or Wylie or whatever the fuck — goes for his backpack in a rush before disappearing into the foyer. 

Little shit. 

But the present tense is flying by while he doesn't look, so he goes for the baggie crammed inside his pocket and takes the white pills out, automatically reaching for the recently-discarded spoon in the sink. He doesn’t give it too much thought anymore — it's a ritual that feels as old as time. Nothing too dramatic.

White tablets on the counter, press the metal down. Grind. Snort the surface clean. Maybe lick his middle finger and smear it around to gather the remaining powder, down the rest of his acid coffee and ignore how his esophagus nearly blisters.

Grab his jacket. Leave. 

*

The bus doors fold shut and Weston gives him the finger through the windows as he moves towards the back seats. It's not enough that Ed had to run after him with a dysfunctional leg, no. He's downright poltergeisted, just like that little Selim creep that old lady Dante deemed appropriate to add to her collection of trashy foster kids. Good for her. Good for the maintenance paycheck. 

He waits at the stop for about three more minutes before a familiar, audacious, refurbished red convertible screeches past him and then takes a probably illegal ‘U’ turn. It barely comes to a full halt in front of him before the door opens.

“Get in loser, we’re gonna go find us a cool back alley to beat you up in.” Winry beams at him through thin sunglasses; sharp looking as always. Crop top, perfectly winged eyeliner, not a hair out of place. Ed always feels deficient when placed next to her, but this is the girl who’s offered her house as a safe haven on the embarrassingly high amount of times in which he’s had to run bleeding out of his. 

This is the girl who’s never told. 

He doesn’t have to force the smile with her. The locks activate and she goes full-unhinged as the car accelerates and their backs press up against the seating. 

“You don’t have to floor it every time Winry — there’s a fuckin’ stop sign right up there!” He exclaims. It’s a lost cause.

“Man, don’t you just love how _sweet_ the engine sounds? Do you notice any difference? I tweaked a few things over the weekend.” She half-yells over the noise without looking away from the road ahead. Her ponytail whips around in an incredibly stylish manner. Ed isn't gaping. 

“Did you cut the break cords?” He asks — wishes. 

It’s okay because, statistically speaking, most drivers survive fatal accidents — it’s the dumbass passengers’ seat that usually gets to eat shit and die. Anyhow, he can’t allow himself to think like this before at least giving Al the daily morning call. 

Winry laughs, loud and loony and in a way he likes to think she only does around him — but that’s most likely just his methylphenidate kicking in. The breeze is harsh at this speed, today might be one of the good days. 

*

8:42 am

He was wrong; the sun’s coming up with purpose today. That is, getting majorly pissed at him for wearing so much black. He’d retaliate, but people already think he’s weird — they do not need to see Edward Elric flick off the fucking sky. 

“Hey look! It’s Lan,” Winry elbows him as they merge into the pedestrian traffic that leads to the school’s main entrance, “I thought she wasn’t coming back for another week — come, let's go say hi!” Before he knows it, he’s being pulled towards the little grassed area in which all the rich cool Asian kids sulk around before class — contemplating the half-consumed cigarettes between their fingers, rolling their eyes at how lamely the leaves turn. 

His stomach clenches. 

Lan Fan was allegedly still visiting her family’s estate in the faraway lands of Chinese modern aristocracy and their incomprehensibly huge, lavish residences… Or so he’d heard. 

Amongst the many rumors that surround Lan Fan, is the one about how she got herself purposefully kicked out of the private institution that had also been unfortunate enough to have Ling fucking Yao as one of their students a year back after he was expelled for indecency and substance abuse within the school’s premises (or something of the sort, probably entailing a lot more than what Ed was willing to be made aware of). 

It’s was something like solidarity to his cause — that she follow his example suit without paying any mind to saving face for college applications. Oh, the things one doesn’t have to worry about when one’s loaded. 

But still, _that’s_ a dedicated friendship if he’s ever seen one. Probably a little overkill, too. But it’d been enough motivation for her to nearly snap Ed’s shoulder out of place that one time he made some snarky remark about Ling and was unfortunate enough to be within earshot distance from her. He doesn’t even remember what he said, his recollection of the event is completely taken over by the fact that Lan’s got some mad skills when it comes to whatever obscure form of martial arts she masters, and she’s got arms likely made of steel. 

Though Winry could probably murder a couple of people too, if she ever felt the need to, that is. So he feels pretty confident about what he’s managed to build with her over the course of a couple of years — friendship wise. 

Confident, lucky, and spoiled rotten. He’s felt like that ever since they met in middle school and he was this snotty, deformed, loud-mouthed pain in the ass whom Child Services had separated from his younger brother. A walking sob story and all that. 

Other people don’t really see the sense in it, because she’s a shining presence; attractive, whip-smart, confident, driven. A radiant, sparkling _cool_ _girl_ — yes, even if she does hate the term. Why she’d choose to waste her time and energy on this gloomy orphan with messy hair, no one could tell. He’s just as clueless as everybody else, but he goes with it because she shares her Granny with him and she’s a kick-ass semi-retired mechanic who rolls her own cigarettes like an old-timey western character and whips up a killer stew that could cure pneumonia within two spoonfuls. It never hurts to have the privilege of them treating him like family. 

Right now, he fishes his phone out of his back pocket and noncommittally motions to Winry before they get too close to a likely catastrophic social interaction for which it’s still too early. She nods and he takes it as his nonverbal permission to jump ship and regroup later in the day. Maybe she just saw his anxiety and doesn’t feel like forcing him to act normal around her friends today, and that’s good enough, too. 

With certain relief, the phone’s at his ear and he tries to concentrate on the task of reaching out to his beautiful, amazing, perfect, young genius of a brother for their daily check-in calls while he walks towards the main doors again — except there are all types of menacing specimens in this miserable establishment that’d rather he concentrate in getting restless over nothing. 

One of said menaces is none other than Roy Mustang: the line starts ringing as Roy Mustang catches his eye. He’s slightly leaning against a concrete wall, arms crossed, his entire posture one big ode to general impassiveness. Luisa’s talking to him and she’s doing that thing where she absentmindedly draws her long, pale fingers along her long, pale collarbones, back and forth. 

All plum-black dress and an eggplant purple lipstick. He practically never sees her at the house. 

He has a vague idea of how she uses her “people skills” to the advantage of getting herself different beds to sleep in that aren’t her own — he can’t blame her for not wanting to spend too much time in that hell-hole, and as long as they’re all gathered together by the time they get the monthly government check-ins, Dante stays off their case. Most of the time. 

Anyway, it seems 'pretty-boy Roy' is this month’s catch. He much-too vividly remembers their first-ever interaction a year back, when he was minding his own business while making the ongoing, terrible, _terrible_ mistake of sitting at the bottom of the bleachers to read a book, when he came up out of nowhere — a panting, sweaty mess, his jet black hair swept to the side and plastered to his temples with the moisture resulting from hours of football practice. He remembers how unapologetically he just snatched up the water bottle next to him — _Ed’s_ bottle, took the cap off and went to town on it. 

Before Ed could even get a single syllable out (or before he could even _think_ of what said syllable would be the beginning of, other than a choked, half-assed, whiny reproach) his water was down to nothing in a single gulp. He parted his glistening, pink lips from the lid and Ed kicked himself for looking at them as Roy raised the bottle and poured the remaining dribble over his face— the massive shit —, he’d sighed in satisfaction, and _then_ looked down at a perplexed 14-year-old Edward who’d just been robbed of his only source of hydration by one of the ‘older kids whom you don’t wanna mess with’. 

“I… That was…” Ed started, Roy didn’t so much as blink. 

He just stared and sized him up. 

“You’re that new kid, Evan?” Nonchalance was apparently a gift mastered by this guy. 

Ed worked the spit in his mouth. “Edward…” 

Roy cocked his head once in what could have been acknowledgment, Ed thought that was a weird way to segue into beating someone up, but prepared to bolt nonetheless. 

“Right.” He continued while going through the trouble of screwing the cap back on the empty plastic container, “Well,” he said, turning fully towards him and slightly crouching down, “thanks a lot, Edward.” 

Roy lightly tossed the bottle back at his lap, _smirked_ at him, and turned to start jogging back into the field. 

The sound of plastic scrunching up was the official soundscape that accompanied the rest of his day.

The line clicks and Ed is brought back to the here-and-now. 

“Hi, brother!” Ed will never get over that first greeting — he’s fucking hooked on whatever neurotransmitters sparkle into elated synapsis every time Alphonse’s voice reaches his ear. He smiles, and it has nothing to do with the generous grammage of Ritalin that’s steadily coursing through his veins. Roy idly looks past Luisa in that exact moment and his stare lands on him, Ed is quick to look away as he walks past. 

“What’s crackin’, kid.” He says, but Mustang’s dark eyes are still on his back for some reason, he’s sure of it. 

Al giggles, Ed feels his heart quelch. It’s disgusting. “I’m only a year younger than you, _kid_.”

“Says you and a missing birth certificate.” He’s always glad he can more or less joke about all the dark shit they’ve been through — namely, a ratty house burnt down because of lit cigarette buts and a bust-to-shit gas stove. A place they barely managed to run out of before the roof caved in; an arm and leg that live to tell the tale of blatant child neglect, and a lot of valued documents lost to the fire. 

He wants to get a laugh out of it, at the very least. 

“Well, then,” Al says in exaggerated contemplation “I guess if _height_ has any say in this —“ 

“Don't even go there, we’ve established that you’re a freak of nature.” He tries snappy, he always fails at that with Al. It comes out soft and warm and mushy. 

“Whatever you say, brother.” Ed hears him suppressing a laugh. He rolls his eyes as the sickly baby blue that coats the hall materializes in front of him.

“So how’s today looking?” He asks. 

“Oh, nothing life-changing” — and thank the fucking gods of everything worldly for that — “just waiting for Zampano to come down and give me a ride.”

“They still don’t let you just walk?” Best parents a kid could ask for, really.

Shy laughter. “I dunno, I think he enjoys the drive, too.” 

He’d gotten the lottery, and the Asshole Sorting Hat system the orphanage had didn’t let him share the prize with his older brother. 

Ed was still pretty much handicapped from the fire accident, and he wouldn’t get assigned to a wholesome family in that state — even if Mr. Jerso and Zampano had expressed their distaste towards splitting the brothers up and their willingness to take Ed under their roof as well. The bottom line is homosexual couples get the finger almost any time; even if they would’ve practically been doing the place a favor. 

“Huh, I guess.” Locker— he tucks the phone against his shoulder while opening the combination. “But what’s the point of living in a nice neighborhood if you can’t enjoy the strolling.” 

He remembers one of the first calls Al gave him after he’d gone away (at least one of the first times in which the infirmary let him wheel himself towards the phone booth just outside the room. It was a mission in futility with only one working arm until an anonymous nurse finally got vexed enough to use her foot and push him in the right direction), he was trapped in the eternally uncomfortable limbo of relieved and worried sick. 

“ _Brother, this house has a_ breakfast nook.” He’d told him. “ _Jerso and Zampano are super cool — they’re actual zoologists! And, and there’s an attic with this amazing window — just wait till you get here you’ll love it! — How are you feeling? Are the bandages off yet?”_

Ed smiled as wide as he could amidst the stench of formaldehyde, “ _That’s great, Al._ ” he didn’t need to know that the chances of them reuniting under the same roof before he was eighteen were slim to none. He tried not to think about the fact that that was seven years away from happening. “ _I’m fine, they’re gonna let me go back in the home in a week.”_ He tried his best to press the phone’s receiver to his lap in time so that Al didn’t hear what had to be the millionth coughing fit he’d had that day — inhalation trauma was a real bitch. 

“ _Brot — Ed? Ed, are you sure you feel okay? Are they giving you enough medicine?”_ Shattering voice. Snot. Tears. _“Brother, does it still hurt a lot?”_

Ed lied through his teeth. 

The bell’s scornful ringing snaps him back to the present tense. 

“Do you even believe in such a thing as ‘strolling’?”

He grins, “I guess you gotta point there. But it sounds like something you’d do — enjoy the scenery and shit. Build a flower inventory.” 

“It’s just a boring suburb.” 

“Sounds like a piece of heaven.” It is. “Hey, you got last week’s money, by the way?” It's usually a monthly transference because the bookstore where he works part-time doesn’t do significant biweekly payments, so he just waits until it accumulates into something a little more useful and then sends it over along with — er, the other winnings, earned from what he guesses could be his “other job”. 

“Oh, yeah… Listen, Ed, I really appreciate it but I’ve already told you like a gazillion times, you _seriously_ don’t need to do that. I’m more than alright over here, you know it. I don’t—” 

“Yeah, yeah, I know, just — look, don’t worry about it. I’m more than alright too, just use it to get yourself an anatomically-correct kitten plushie so you can practice operating on it —” 

“Ugh! Ed, what the—” Bingo. It’s enough to derail him from his senseless guilt.

“Or just save it up for when you wanna open up your very own feline-themed amusement park. Listen, I have to get to class but I’ll call you later. Be good — always tell the truth; eat your vegetables; you know the drill.” 

“You should take your own advice in terms of healthy eating habits.” 

“Imagine me sticking my tongue out. Get lost.” 

Al laughs and the world seeps in glory. 

“Love you, Al.”

“I love you too, brother, have a nice day!” 

Just for him, he will try. 

*

1:00 pm 

The only real downside to being ultra-concentration incarnate for almost eight hours straight of AP calculus and biochemistry classes is..., well, the downside. The rollercoaster fall that starts adding weight to his feet and lids. 

He lost his last opportunity to go snort himself anew to Ling’s insufferable insistence that he explains his drug testing methods to him in excruciating detail, instead of just taking back his baggie, handing him his cash and then proceeding to ignore him for the rest of the school year, as everyone else does. 

“Yo, that molly you checked for me last week? You were _so_ right about its purity, I actually feel like I’m still on it! How’s that even possible?!” He wants to say " _Placebo, I don't know._ " But Yao is sliding an arm across his shoulder and guiding them towards the cafeteria. 

“How do you even extract exact percentages? It’s amazing! Oh — oh! And the blow was also clean as snow like you said." He also doesn't get the chance to answer “ _It’s a straightforward multiplication; the weight of your pill in milligrams times the scale of MDMA content when cross-referenced with a colorimetric chart — Yours was about 75% ecstasy and 25% crummy purple colorant._ ” 

"I kind of expected it already, my guy rarely lets me down with a drop in quality, but still, it’s good to be sure, you know?” Now is his time to shine. 

Ed squirms around in his hold, "Your guy, as in the guy who once gave you paracetamol and told you it was oxy?" He glances at the bathroom door with longing as they walk past. 

Ling barks out a laugh like he just got his money's worth at an overpriced standup show, “Aw man, see, this is why I love you. And I think it’s a rad thing what you’re doing. I mean it’s practically a public health service! — By the way, where do you get your fentanyl detector things?” 

He doesn’t get to say “ _Trade secret”_ because the only thing more prominent than Ling’s annoying curiosity, is his being annoying in general, and soon he cuts himself off. 

“Hey! Come sit over here, we’re all big fans of your work, c’mon!” He lures him towards the table of doom and raging popularity. 

This is what he gets for semi-innocuously trying to put his chem skills to good use and get something out of people’s worries that they might be inhaling drywall instead of actual cocaine. Also for capitalizing on the fact that most of them don’t know that they could get their own drug testing kits off the internet, but — well, people seem to trust _his_ assessments, specifically, and it can’t be fun to risk doing it at home and getting caught. He, on the other hand, has got the lab all to himself on most days, so he might as well. 

It’s relieving that he only has about fifteen daily minutes in which to cram his lunch breaks before Izumi starts waiting on him at said lab to go over his mid-term projects, because he can’t make small talk to save his life, least of all banter with people his age outside of a very select group of exceptions. 

Mei Chang smiles at him as he gets pushed down on the seat across from her by Ling. He tries smiling back, but he doesn’t know if he got it right, because his burn marks always itch a little extra with a round of self-consciousness whenever he’s amongst the wrong crowd. And by ‘wrong’ he means practically anyone who isn’t Winry — because she never made a face or hesitated once before offering him a hug and that felt really, really good.

He hates that his Advanced Placement curriculum gets him a block schedule that isn’t compatible with her’s, but somehow always makes him bump into other Juniors that come give him sly, weird-ass smiles and say shit like _“Hey, Tringham dealt me this crystal but it looks kinda iffy, can I run it past you?_ ”, and accidentally land him into yet another brawl with sleazy, clownass fucking Russell who thinks it’s _Ed’s_ fault his shit’s garbage. 

Whatever. 

He doesn’t even have time for typical high school quarrels. Point in fact, he doesn’t have time for anything that isn’t education as a means to get himself a scrap of social mobility and work — both legal employment and this other side-gig of his — so that he can sustain himself and also make sure that Al is living as comfortably as possible. 

At the moment, he feels too many eyes on him — he’s kind of used to people staring at where scar tissue curls and creeps upwards over the right side of his neck and sticks a little form out of his shirt. Or at his hand when he’s not wearing the glove — or at the glove when he is. It’s not cold enough to wear high-neck sweaters yet.

He looks over at Lan Fan, whose food doesn't look like it’s being eaten instead of speared repeatedly with a plastic fork, so maybe she’s just one of those people who is in a mood before they get some nourishment into their systems. Up this close, he can appreciate her hairdo and suddenly gets hijacked by an all-too-familiar pang of confusion, which leaves him wondering if he wishes he were able to wear those pretty hair-clips she’s got at the sides of her bangs, or if he wishes he could _be_ one of those pretty hair-clips and live next to her bun. 

Fuck. Wanting to transform into an inert object probably isn’t healthy — and counselor Hughes wouldn’t approve. 

He _does_ like hair accessories, is the thing. He limits himself to nondescript elastic bands but looks at Winry’s barrettes and pins and scrunchies with something like yearning.

“— And so I told him to hit me with his best powder, but I’d like to see just how much of his talk is talk and how much of it is walk, y’ know what I’m saying?” Ed doesn’t say _“As we’ve already established, Ling, no I don't.”_ because Ling concludes whatever it is he was saying while Ed spiraled into the depths of an identity crisis from which he hasn’t gotten out of entirely. 

He doesn’t even know where to place those fucking thoughts, and they’re a whole new brand of terrifying. Having long hair has granted him enough aggression during his life. He doesn’t want to dig himself further into the pit of outcast-ness. He knows about being a ‘Fag’, ‘fairy scum’; ‘sissy fuck’ — all names graciously attributed to him mainly by Evie, another one of his loving forced siblings. 

Ling elbows him, Ed flinches _hard_ , but he’s accustomed to scraping enough hope out of even the most disastrous of situations that he has faith in thinking maybe no one noticed. 

“So, whaddya say partner? You in?” 

“H-huh?” He turns to him — a kooky smile that _never_ fucking fades. 

“It’ll be fun! People from our previous school are totally clueless, right, Lan? They’ll seriously be super excited to test their stuff and get to use that as a new form of social capital and — hah, get a major kick out of firing their dealers if they’re giving ‘em total crap, right? And we can up the price to something ridiculous — something even _I_ would’ve paid back in the day, before I got this fascinating reality check amongst the common folk.” He grins “So how does 50/50 sound to you? Man, we’re going to take over the _world!,_ You and me.” 

Ed is 110% sure Ling Yao is a fellow addict, it’s not natural to have this amount of social energy. He also doesn’t comprehend how one gets to the level of pretentiousness needed to _fire_ a drug dealer, those people must be another kind of insufferable, altogether. 

“I—”

“You’re right, you’re right, I’ll let you think it over — but hey, don’t take too long, yeah? Next week’s coming up and we need to be ready! Tell your friend, what’s her name? Winnie? Wi… —” This is what he gets for fucking with Wolf. 

“It’s _Winry_ , Ling.” Lan Fan cuts in like a snake’s tooth — but no real venom when directed at Yao. Ed _shudders_. 

“Ah, perfect. So it’s settled, we’ll have ourselves a great party. Oh! And Ed? You can arrive with Winry, but just don’t go with her in like a ‘dating’ capacity if that’s possible, okay?” 

That gets his attention. “What?” 

“Yeah, you know”, Ling idly plays around with the tater tots on his tray (a tray which suddenly materialized in front of him, damn, he’s got some loyal companion) “She’s a catch, I’m sure she could steal the heart of some agreeable lonely bachelor with too much time on his hands and a giant trust fund—”

“What the fuck,” Ed mutters, but it’s mostly whispered and mostly directed at himself. 

“— And a pretty sweet cabin by the lake, so yeah, just— unless you two are like an _item_ , but it seems mostly platonic to me. I mean, even if you’re not, I think we should all be pro-polygamy in this day and age, right?” He laughs, lighthearted and genuine as ever. 

Lan Fan nods curtly in agreement. 

Ed — stays put. Ling then turns a meaningful glance at him and it takes him a few more embarrassingly long seconds to fit the pieces in and realize that he’s talking about himself. He doesn’t know if he ought to feel more surprised about his interest in Winry or about the fact that he is referring to himself as an “agreeable lonely bachelor”.

 _Or_ the fact that he’s not sure if his mispronouncing Winry’s name was a part of the indirect courtship ploy or an actual mistake. 

Man, what a space-cadet. 

“Uh…, No. I mean — Yeah, no. We’re not — we’re not an item. Or platonic. Or anything. It’s not like that.” Then why in the world is his face heating up? 

See, this is why he doesn’t do lunch at the fucking cafeteria. Everything is embarrassing. 

He looks over at Lan Fan — big mistake — and realizes she’s smiling at him, gaze determined. He is going to die before getting his legal independence and being able to finally leave that pandemonium of a house and go get Al. 

All because Lan Fan wants to eat him alive and — well, maybe he wouldn’t mind. He’s got a lot of respect for any woman that can hand him his ass in a fair fight, and there’s gotta be worse ways to go. If he survives, though, he’ll maybe have to go to this stupid party and agree to Ling’s batshit plan — if only because Al’s birthday’s coming up and it calls for something splendorous he could get with the extra cash.

Ling’s smile widens if that’s even possible. 

“And I bet you can get _yourself_ a bachelor, too,” He doesn’t mean for his hand to clench around the lower hem of his sweatshirt, but it does. “I’m sure Roy Mustang’s gonna be there and” — Someone just sucked all the air out of the room and he wants to kick that person’s ass — “I mean, not to pry or anything, but I notice he often looks at your like he’s getting impatient.” His voice is down a suggestive notch. How could this guy even know this? Is Ed really so obvious about the way he pointedly _avoids_ any sort of interaction with Roy Mustang? He shouldn’t be, his methods for dodging suspicion had been polished for _years_. If anything, he’s supposed to know how to lock people out. 

“I thought he was dating Riza Hawkeye.” Mei chimes in. 

Ah, Riza, the only person on the planet more terrifying than Lan Fan, but he’s never talked to her outside of what’s been strictly necessary, she’s been about the only person in the school who doesn’t ask him how come he’s a Senior at fifteen. She’s respectful, efficient, and an actual kill machine when it comes to archery from what he’s heard. 

Ling shrugs. “Maybe, maybe not. I don’t get that vibe off the two.” Ed doesn’t either, Roy Mustang is that suave, lazy, pompous quarterback ass, bisexual-disaster legend from what he knows — and sees, really, but he unfortunately _also_ sees that he is stupid hot and kind of mysterious and makes his skin crawl with something like trepidation, because God (if such a thing exists) _hates_ him and made Mustang kind of competent in exact sciences, too, so he’s in practically all of his classes— and his relationship to Riza seems to be more based on the fact that they go way back. 

“But hey,” Ling’s smile goes lopsided “— that _does_ mean he’s into pretty blondes, right?” He pokes Ed’s knee and arches his eyebrows at him — the world goes still. Then everything collapses. 

Ed is going to piss himself in embarrassment in T minus ten seconds. 

_“Tranny little shit."_

His throat gets real sticky as he looks down at his lap. Why did he let himself be dragged out to the fucking wolves? Why hasn’t he learned anything about basic survival and people’s cruel intentions? Why in the world didn't they patch him up with some skin grafts as a kid. Granted, it's not something low-end unspecialized clinics offer to orphaned patients who are piss poor.

The point is he really shouldn’t have worn this red sweatshirt. The color’s nice, but it’s too revealing of the scar. It’s off-putting. 

He makes Ling’s voice background static — because he _gets it_ , but doesn’t actually want to hear them laugh at him — as he gets up and walks away. 

*

Never has the little Ziploc inside his pocket been more insistent about coming out. In the state he’s in, a stimulant probably isn’t the best option seeing as he is already prone to naturally-happening panic attacks, but he left the shit he uses to knock himself out at night back at the house, jammed under his mattress. 

He tries slow, deep breaths — his lungs let him know it’s just not happening today. 

The floor swims under his hasty steps as he flings his jacket back on and starts doing all the buttons — the weather can eat a dick. He’s almost at the bathroom, and he still has a few minutes to go barricade himself inside one of the stalls where he’ll have space to properly hyperventilate. He can totally make it. It's gonna be— 

Blunt force hits him like a train derailed by its speed.

 _— fine_. 

Solid. Too perfunctory to be someone’s resentful fist. 

He almost doesn’t feel himself fall back on his ass, but there’s always room for humiliation, and so he doesn’t know if the red liquid that coats his left hand after he parts it from his face is blood, or if he’s finally managed to blush hard enough for his face to become a pigment and stain his fingers. 

One thing he’s sure of now is that he just walked into an opening door and that it hurts like a motherfucker. Okay, so that’s actually _two_ things he’s sure of, now. 

A pair of shoes materialize in front of him and he looks up to see a face locked in overwhelming worry — a face that, now that he thinks of it, belongs to someone quite familiar.

Brilliant. 

“ _Shit._ Are you okay?” Says Mustang. He says it like he’s just murdered a unicorn by running over it and is asking this to said unicorn’s little yearling — which was injured non-fatally while having to witness their parent’s gory demise. “I am so sorry, is — are you okay?” He repeats.

Ed looks at his blood-smeared hand and runs his tongue over his lips — they’re coated in that metal tang that’s too familiar. 

“Yeah,” He breathes as he shifts to stand, there’s immediately a pair of hands — wow, strong — helping him up while he mournfully apologizes, even though he shouldn’t — it’s his fault for being a hurried idiot junkie.

Mustang grabs his right hand and he mentally congratulates himself for wearing the glove today. He tries placing his weight proportionately so as to not eat shit on his own accord barely seconds after the first accident, but Mustang hauls him up in a split second with only one arm like it means nothing, even though he’s also unexplainably gentle about it. Goddamn. 

“Ah — um, thank you.” He says, Mustang is looking at him like he grew a second head. 

“What for? I — Are you absolutely positive you’re okay? We should go to the infirmary.” He says, and Ed’s probably brain damaged because he couldn’t have heard a ‘We’ amidst that last sentence. “You’re bleeding pretty bad.” 

Ed shakes his head but then blood starts dripping from his chin and down his chest. He brings his left sleeve up to try and wipe it off, “S’fine.” He knows it doesn’t look it, so he adds “I’ve had worse.” 

Mustang scowls at him and he almost collapses at the sight alone. 

“No.” He says — declares, proclaims, announces. What is that _voice,_ even? “Come on, I practically shoved the door open.” Ed opens his mouth to protest but Mustang is _touching him again —_ all mindful and feathery — and guiding him by the shoulders towards the end of the hall and… _Fuck_ glorified football players and their abnormal heights. 

He’s too close. 

They start walking but then Ed digs his heels into the ground. The floor squeaks. Mustang is forced to halt to avoid stumbling onto him and looks like Ed’s finally being way too weird for him to compute. 

“Okay?” Mustang is trying, at least. Even if he’s going into the ‘annoyed’ area of voice-tones. He should’ve just stepped over him and walked away, it wouldn’t be the rudest thing that’s been done to him. 

_“— He’s into pretty blondes—“_

He feels the familiar dread of shame creep up his nerves again, here comes the bile and — fuck this. He needs a hit and he needs it now. Nurse Sarah isn’t gonna give him anything stronger than ibuprofen. 

“Th-thanks, but, I’m fine. Really, it’s nothing. I’m just gonna wash it off. Thank you.” He goes for the bag on the floor but Mustang’s already beat him to it and picks it up to hand it back. Ed takes the strap and gives him a tight-lipped smile that hurts — his lip’s probably busted. 

“Are you sure?” 

“Yeah. Thank you.” He says again, like a broken record with a (probably) broken nose. 

“It’s nothing,” Mustang answers, only now completely stoic and thoroughly unamused. “Just refrain from blaming me when you develop an untreatable concussion.” And with that, he turns and saunters away. 

Ed doesn’t get to say _“Will do.”,_ he doesn’t get to come up with a counter-snarky remark. 

Or maybe he does, but he’s so busy staying frozen in the same spot with his face dripping all over his jacket that he doesn’t hear himself say it. 

Shit — this guy is _mean_. 

But also not. 

But also — Shit. 

Ling’s coy, mocking, voice is still ringing in his ears, alongside the pitiful sound of his face colliding with the bathroom door. This is what he gets for developing a totally-mild crush on an asshole who’d probably take him to prom so that he could dump a bucket of pig’s blood on his head in front of everyone. 

Only four things are certain: it’s a little past one o’clock, he’s probably hemorrhaging, he still feels Mustang’s hands on his shoulders, and he wants to die.   
  



	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I tried to make this chapter shorter but then, what can I say. This fic has officially hijacked me and my fingers. Thanks for reading!

He should count himself lucky that there aren’t many things in this world scarier than Izumi Curtis and her deadpan stare, so if he can get past this, he’ll be golden. 

“What gives, kiddo? Had a falling out with a tree?” She says as he walks into the empty biology lab with bloodied paper towels pressed to his face. Even though her tone is stern as ever, the endearment gives him a pretty good hunch that she’s at least not angry. 

“Som’n like that.” He answers, as opposed to confessing that it wasn’t so much a fight or a “falling out” as it was a one-man circus show, and that the “tree” was actually the one person in this stupid school that can make his mouth water in a near pavlovian-like instinct when the asshole’s wearing a tight blue polo. 

And bleed. 

“Look at me.” She says — orders. He doesn’t know he’s ever seen her in another posture that isn’t either cross-armed or with her fists on her hips. Right now, it’s the former. 

He obeys and only then realizes he hadn’t been helping his own cause by staring down at his shoes while walking to the classroom. Gravity wasn't working with him and all that.

“It wasn’t — It was just an accident with a swinging door, it was stupid.” He hurries to say, because she’s looking at him with her trademark deadly glare, but it’s also kind of sad, and it’s not every day that Izumi finds it within herself to dispense _compassion_ unless she’s witnessing something truly pathetic. 

“Yeah? Was said door by any chance _swung_ by a certain Tringham kid?” She arches her eyebrows. Ed shakes his head, but it’s a delayed reaction and probably a bit too sluggish. 

He hopes she doesn’t notice.

He miraculously found half a Xanax pill amongst his bag of miscellaneous prescription drugs — which he then settled on dry swallowing as opposed to go through the trial of finding the utensils needed to pulverize it with inside a bathroom stall — but the afterglow from his morning’s intake mixed in with the residual adrenaline from his encounter with Mustang has yet to fade and he’s still pretty much on the verge of… 

Something. 

Throwing up? Purposely slamming his face against another surface? Having a nervous breakdown? 

Izumi’s got a knack for sniffing those out at a miles distance, no matter how hard he locks himself in or how good he thinks he’s become at building his walls— up into infinite heights; spiked and scalding to the touch; it’s edges decorated with heaps of glass shards. She does things like come up to him mid-class and pat his head in a way she probably things is gentle, but feels like he’s being cuffed for fucking up his petri dishes — and he’s about to utter an instinctive apology that would give away too much, until she puts a steady hand on his shoulder before dropping her voice and asking if he needs to step outside for a moment. 

She’s only had to do it once or twice, when they’re doing experiments that involve the use of fire.

“Hm, or perhaps it was that asshat Greg.” She briefly squints at him before moving towards her desk.

Ed is about to say how actually, out of all the twisted, colorful assortment of characters he’s got to share a house with, Greg is pretty much the only one (when he still lived at the house, that was) who hasn’t been as bad. The only one who had enough empathy for him and/or spite for Dante to come in between him and Evie — who dared to shove one of Dante’s favorites off a chair and face the consequence. 

He’s about to say it, but Izumi’s gesturing at him to sit on one of the metal stools as she opens the crystal cabinet next to her and continues “—Actually, don't tell me if it _was_ him. I’d rather not know for sure that one of my brightest students got bested by a greedy snob who wears sunglasses indoors.” 

He must admit that even though Greg isn’t _as bad,_ it doesn’t mean Izumi’s hate is unfounded. Namely, it’s based on the fact that he’s tragically prone to sexist remarks on pretty much any occasion where he’s got a crowds ear. 

Ed hates — in so far as he sometimes hates pretty much anything that he can’t solve or place or figure out within minutes — that said remarks always make him feel extremely antsy, to the point where he can’t do anything aside from drill his eyes into the ground and go with whatever it is he’s spewing about his most recent fuck-a-thon. 

However, he could be worse. Everything could. Plus, he doesn't want to go out on a limb about procuring himself a new pill-provider. 

Izumi comes to him with a bottle of rubbing alcohol and bats his hand away from his face before he gets the chance to wince dramatically. 

The smell itself brings bad memories. Soaked bandages on skin like raw, slimy meat that wouldn’t scab properly — paper blankets. A progressively darker shade of pink. The flame’s roadmap on his limbs. 

A world consumed by the scent of smoke and disinfectant. 

“Are you saying you have favorites?” He says while she tilts the bottle over a small cotton ball.

“Don’t be delusional.” She huffs while placing two fingers on his chin to nudge his face upwards — and he tries focusing on the fact that there are people that are _good_ and considerate and don’t want to kick his teeth in (in a fatal way, at least) “That would be grossly unprofessional.” 

There are people that hover over his fucked up little life and stick around with nothing to gain in return. 

He wants to smile at the ceiling but the substance stings and she isn’t gentle about cleaning him up. His animal brain is compulsively triggering that same old fucking slideshow of unwanted images about hospitals and harsh fingers. 

His hands clench around the stool, but he tries shutting those things out by reminding himself that Izumi’s right here, and she’s never let him fall too far.

*

He stops bleeding at around 3:15 pm with the charitable assistance provided by the cotton balls stuffed into his nostrils — which he is sure to take out before showing up to work — which is also the reason why he avoids answering Winry’s “ _wyd later_ ” until he gets to the bookstore and has underpaid labor as an excuse to not let her see him today. The inside of his lip is resolutely not going to stop flooding his mouth with the foil-like tang of it, but it's manageable enough to make it background noise. 

Izumi tried grilling him some more about his perpetrator, and he could have just told the truth — heavens know he’s pretty shit at lying, and withholding information registers as the same thing to him —, it wasn’t that big of a deal, after all, was it? 

At least it wasn’t supposed to be.

Still, Roy’s name would not leave his lips. 

He’d maintained eye contact and tried willing himself to say it, to just say “Okay, _Roy Mustang pushed a door open and my face got in the way_.” but he never felt the words forming up his throat without the premonition of a telling twitch, a shudder, the warm creep of shame taking his face all over again. 

Fuck no. 

He can’t think about it too much. The mind is a sticky thing... Maybe he just deadass fears for Roy’s integrity if Izumi finds out, because she’d never believe it was an accident. 

Yeah…, that’s probably it. 

*

8:20 pm 

Ed creaks his way upstairs through wooden floorboards that’ll soon cave without a second’s notice. One of these days, someone will get their knee bent outwards while walking around the house — around the many landmines that the growing mafia of termites have fondly set up around the premises. Knowing his luck, it'll probably be him. 

His safest bet is to go up by taking two steps at a time, given that it also saves a lot of time he’d always rather be using on being alone in his room. He shuts the door behind him, sticks a thumb under his messenger bag’s strap, and lifts it to place it on the floor. He doesn’t toss it because it almost always makes him wince at the loud _thump,_ reminding him of how much weight he forgot he’d been carrying around all day. He’s gotta start leaving these textbooks at school somewhere other than in his already overcrowded locker, it’s a miracle his shoulder hasn’t fallen off yet. 

He doesn’t waste another second before going over to his bed and letting his knees cave against the edge so that he slams face-first into the mattress. It creaks, because everything else around here does — why should this mattress think itself special? His mind goes static with the exhaustion of another day’s work. 

Or it might be that he’s hearing some scratching on the wall, and it might still be mice. 

Or — and _here’s_ a thought — it might be that he did actually get concussed, and he is going to die in this shithole the moment sleep takes him under. 

He hears squeaking. 

Okay — definitely mice, then. 

Mice they haven’t been able to get fully rid of since Georgie left — or, rather, since he was forced to leave. _Rehomed,_ as people put it. Ed has to suppress something like a shudder. 

Sure, the dude had some major issues. He can’t think of him without eliciting a disturbingly accurate memory of meaty, slicked up fingers, digging into a peanut butter jar. And to think that out of all his eating habits, maybe that was the least repelling one.

Every surface he touched ended up somehow sticky. Not a single clothing item he owned was free of some pretty suspicious yellowish stains — crusted and darkened at the edges of a shirt’s fabric. 

So he had a few highly evident problems to deal with — Ed still can’t fathom how cold-hearted a person’s gotta be to send back a kid they decided to adopt, it has to be one of the worse things that can happen to a person. Words can’t even begin to describe what it must do to be tossed aside, made to sit on the front porch of the place you thought could be your home with a return ticket stapled to your sweater. Waiting for the garbage man. 

It’s been Ed’s own biggest fear since he can remember. Not that he’d admit to it, though. 

For Georgie, shit hit the fan when he came home from school one day, dying of thirst, and where he’d usually down a liter of kool-aid or juice or fucking cowmilk in under a minute, he went for the very first thing he saw; a murky glass of water behind the unplugged, beat-up toaster on the kitchen counter. He gulped it empty before Luisa came down and started asking about the purple little betta fish Jean Havoc had just randomly gifted her — she had been cleaning up one of her transparent jewelry boxes for it, she’d later confessed amidst extreme vexation. But Ed heard the lump of tears she was forcibly sticking to the end of her throat. She left the glass unchecked for no longer than five minutes, she’d said… 

So Dante got rid of him. But not the mice. Or the cockroaches, or the spiders. Or the amalgam of probably mutated insects that’d been bred during Georgie’s time living amongst his own leftover chips and melted ice cream and half-chewed pieces of frankfurter. 

Not a week after that, he got sent back to the crawling depths of the adoptive system and their brick-stuffed pillows, and Ed got relocated to his room because he was (is) the second most hated kid in this house. Now his ranking is only kept thanks to the existence of Greg, who is the antichrist incarnate in the eyes of Dante. 

_Scratch. Scratch. Squeak._

Ed stares at a wall he’s never felt the desire to decorate. It’s all thin, walnut boards with an oppressive feel to it. Next is a closet that's practically empty save for a few hanging shirts and jackets and exactly two drawers that contain the rest of his clothes; jeans, boxers, sweatshirts and socks. Just a couple of each. He is very okay with it, but he some days does wonder if it could be considered as objectively weird — to possess so little and not be bothered by the implications. 

It’s almost soothing to think about the anonymity of it, this space could belong to anyone. He doesn’t weigh it down with reminders of himself. 

His phone vibrates. He half-heartedly groans because last time he checked before leaving work, it was at 7%. He didn’t think it’d make it. Alas, some things thrive in adversity. 

Lotus flowers. He can’t think of other examples. 

A text notification appears, it’s from Al. 

_"Evening, Ed! Have you had any dinner yet?"_

He smiles despite himself. 

_"who’s this, nutrition gestapo?"_

Three little dancing dots appear, 

_"That’s in poor taste, brother. You’ve disappointed me. Speaking of taste, your buds could use a little stimulation outside of hot Cheetos."_

He remembers what smiling like a loon while texting his little brother gets him in public spaces, Paninya elbowed him in English once and said _“Ooh, who’s the lucky lady, then?”._ He didn’t know if he wanted to laugh or grimace under his desk.

Ah, shit, well…, no one’s watching him now. 

_"harsh._ _i eat other kinds of cheetos, too, Al."_

He types, just for imagining his epic eye roll. 

_"Have you at the very least properly hydrated yourself?"_

Al texts at the speed of light, so another message bubble immediately appears, 

_"Just say ‘yes’ if you actually_ have _replenished your electrolytes during the day, that lukewarm glass of water that’s been sitting at your desk for five days does not count."_

Sometimes — and by sometimes Ed means all the goddamned time — Al hits too close to home. Scratch that, he _bullseyes._

It’s a dagger to his back and heart that stings a little at first but suddenly he notices the blade is like packed with tiny flower buds that flourish inside his chest with the health and strength and vitality that Alphonse forces into him every day. Ed doesn’t think his brother has any idea of just how much he keeps him going. How much little stuff like this makes his day. 

*

He doesn’t know how much time passed since the focused glowy pixels of his phone’s screen faded into the slow, lethargic hum of his back eyelids’ darkness. He’s pretty sure Sheska was just in his room, going off about all the editorial sins committed by the soft-back versions of Romeo and Juliet. 

He lifts his phone from where it lay in his chest because he was, like, in the middle of a text conversation with Al, right? The movement is so slow —

— Three, four-five hard, demanding knocks against his window startle him into full awareness, the type of which is confusing enough when one didn’t even realize they’d dozed off to begin with. It’s like he was suspended mid-air. 

He immediately gets up, locking into full alert — remembering where he’s at. He instinctively checks the time — his phone is finally dead. 

He crosses the room in the dark with no small amount of trepidation, it’s been dark outside for a while now but the street lights don’t always show up — it’s a sketchy area he lives in, sometimes they just stutter on for a second before giving up, like a dying firefly. He recognizes the sound didn’t come from the window next to his headboard, but the other one that’s on the side of the house that leads to the adjacent street, which in turn leads to a dead-end after a couple of hundred feet. The front neighbors use that wall to throw their trash at. 

He pulls on the string and the curtain slides up to reveal what might be a serial killer. As soon as he makes out some oddly spiky hair and a pair of biceps at the sides of a furry vest, Ed sighs. 

Greg grins at him as he clicks the window and slides it open with both palms pushing upwards, he feels like an old lady who’s been disturbed long enough during her time and isn’t having it for these punks who egg her house every single Halloween. 

“ _Ed_ , my guy, how’s it going?” There’s a distant roar of a car running just behind him. The air smells like it just rained. 

“What the hell’re you doin’ here?” He says while rubbing grub out of his eye. That nap was deeper than he thought. 

“I was in the area — holy shit, what happened to your face?” He says. Ed isn't awake enough to feel self-conscious about it. He’s been pointedly avoiding mirrors for the second half of his day, and he guesses Sheska didn’t say anything about his appearance at work because he hadn’t begun to bruise yet. 

“Aw, man, you should consult with me before trying to give yourself a nose job!” Always count in Greg Hartmans to find it in himself to react with an appalling amount of amusement to whatever it is life throws his way. “I would’ve said no, obviously, you should have a little more confidence; your face is fine as it is!” 

Ed waits for him to add " _No homo”._ Surprisingly enough, he waits in vain, but he guesses it wasn’t necessary to re-instate just how sarcastic he was being, either. 

So he just kind of nods, suddenly hyper-aware of his grogginess as he has to suppress a yawn. 

“What, you were sleeping? At _ten pm?”_ He teases. Oh, so it’s that time. Or around that number, anyway. He doesn’t get a chance to answer because Greg immediately cuts with “Hey — is your door locked?” He motions beyond Ed and to the end of the room, Ed also looks back, as if to remind himself of the door’s material existence. 

“‘Course it’s locked, this is a bad neighborhood.” 

Greg laughs like that’s actually funny, he leans a tad forward on the forearms he’s got folded at the window’s hinges. He’ll probably splinter himself. 

“Great. Okay, so, me and the guys are gonna go procure ourselves some poison down at old Hawkeye’s little nest of worldly pleasures.” — meaning the dollar store, that’s more stocked with liquor than it is with practically whatever else it is dollar stores are supposed to have — “We might go try our luck at the den later — who knows, Martha wants to drop acid tonight and she’s insistent about going down to the train tracks instead. But hey, the night’s still young! You in or what?” 

That “or what” is probably something that entails the use of the words “ _you wuss_ ”.

Ed hesitates. He caves too easily under social pressure. 

“Are you telling Luisa?” He asks, and feels even more like an elderly grandma, chastising this kid for not being mannered enough to go check on his lovely twin sister, but it’s more like he’s welcoming any chance to divert attention from himself.

Although it probably wouldn’t be the worse thing for them to reunite, he has no idea how often they actually get to see each other — what with Greg’s self-imposed exile from Dante’s, and his practically dropping out of school soon after (because showing up once a week to class just to save a little face and eat a girl out in the supply room can’t be reflective of what being a student means). He just knows Luisa's been extra mopey since that whole ordeal.

He also knows he’d give his left testicle for the chance to live in the same house, or, hell, even the same city as Al — it’s not like anyone’s ever going to want to undress him, anyway, so he wouldn’t mind having about 1/3rd less genitalia. 

If Al were here, everything would be made fine. There’s nothing in this world that hugging his little brother couldn’t fix, and not just at fucking Christmas, although he still feels his arms around him from that last goodbye. He carries it around like a token of eternal longing. 

But Greg bats his hand around noncommittally, “Yeah, yeah, we texted — or more like I texted and she just repeatedly left me on seen. She even here?” 

Ed can’t be anything but fully honest, he shrugs. 

“Hmm, must be out for a hunt then. Probably fucking Mustang’s brains out as we speak.” Ed very pointedly does not react to that, at all. It helps a lot that he just woke up from a two-hour nap after a long-ass week. 

“So?” He insists. Ed _'s_ pretty tired, yeah, but he’s also hungry remembering he hasn’t eaten anything aside from — well, coffee doesn’t count, does it? Does one _eat_ a liquid? Does his drug habit count? — no, he doesn’t ingest those orally either. 

Well, fuck, he’s not willing to eat anything out of the buzzing white rot of a fridge that's waiting downstairs. He’d rather starve, too, than risk getting scared out of his socks at the eerie squeak of Dante’s wheelchair, emitted from the dark, the one that announces her entrance like a terrible clamor of trumpets as does the ominous jingling of her pearl rosary. 

Plus, old man Hawkeye’s also well known for a decent assortment of pretzels and m&m’s — he’ll have himself a grand feast. On top of which, if Greg isn’t so bad sober, he is _definitely_ likable when completely plastered. 

Whatever.

He swings his leg over the edge, much to Greg’s joyous approval, and they make their way down with the help of many protuberant bricks and vent tubes and lumps of dried concrete. 

He follows Greg up to the beat-up 90s Nissan that’s been waiting for them as Martha hauls herself halfway out the car’s window with one hand while holding what looks like a bottle of Jägermeister in her other. Ed internally gags. 

“Al _right,_ little Maine’s coming!” She hollers,

“The fuck are you calling li—“

“You wanna wake the whole block up? Shut it, both of you.” Greg interjects as that other dude with a weird Italian name he can’t recall opens the back door for him. 

He gets distracted enough by the speeding car and the near obscene way in which Greg and Martha meet their tongues in the front seat — he then runs his along the patterned tattoo that frames her face, the stoplight glowing on their silhouettes — before processing the fact that Martha actually knows where he’s originally from. 

_Little Maine._

It could only mean Greg knows, and he then gave enough of a crap about that trivia fact of his life before orphanhood — the stark, clear blue skies of the country; the fleeting smell of laundry detergent amidst miles of green, so much, drowning, bright green; his mother's all-encompassing cherry eyes — to remember it, and then enough to share it with his current girlfriend. 

Ed doesn’t know how he feels about it. He wonders what else he might’ve told her about him. He wonders why in the hell Greg seems to like him this much, or at least enough to make this pit stop just to enact his stellar performance of a modern-day, Billy Idol-loving Romeo at his window. 

Greg lights a blunt and passes it to the back, Ed shakes his head and it’s snatched by the guy beside him who dresses like he’s fresh out of a karate tournament. 

Martha keeps pushing the gas pedal, it reminds him of that morning. Except Winry wasn’t trashed, and he didn’t exactly feel the premonition of something mighty wicked coming his way. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> your comments and kudos are much appreciated, that shit keeps me going :)


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey there, allow me to greet you all with a virtual hug. The following is a chapter in which shenanigans ensue, but additional warnings for this one are pretty much centered around violent language; slurs and swearing, as well as nazi imagery on top of implied intolerant and power-abusive attitudes because modern-au Bradley is introduced, so. Lastly, I gotta add there are pretty insensitive discussions surrounding a mentally unstable character.

A swarm of beetles and mayflies dance around the storefront letters and their fluttering artificial light. The static hum they emit is starting to get at him well before they even park across the street. 

Once the car stops and Ed goes for the handle, the guy next to him is quick to slap his hand away. He doesn’t get time for confusion before Greg’s determined voice fills the vehicle. 

“A’ight Dolcetto, you got my back?” He says. _Dolcetto_ , right. 

He remembers now, Greg and he go way back, they’ve been friends since before Ed got annexed to the family — or more like that unfortunate group of coinciding people. 

Dolcetto smirks, “You still gotta ask?” and with that, opens the door on his side, but not before pulling out a ratty black _ski mask_ from the backpack between his feet. 

Before he knows it, Greg’s got one on too — and it’s probably a fucking wool sock with holes ripped into it but he can’t really tell in this light — and Ed’s breath is catching. They’re both out of the car in a flash and he’s about to say something — _anything_ — before Greg pops his head back in and smiles at Ed through the fabric,

“Hey, you want anything?” 

_A time machine so that I can rewind twenty minutes and be back in my room, where I was busy passing the fuck out, mind you._

“Greg, what the fuck,” He manages after stammering through some half-choked noises that never grew into actual words. “What are you _doing_?” 

They weren’t actually going to — 

“What? It’ll be alright, your boy’s no amateur in this,” He leans into the seat like he’s explaining the plot to _Fast & Furious IV _and not about to raid the neighborhood’s five-and-dime, and probably get gunned down by a PTSD-riddled, alcoholic veteran with a hunting rifle stashed under the counter, while at it. 

“You didn’t tell me you were gonna — _fuck_! Shit —“ 

Ed can see he arches his eyebrows in a mixture of confusion and mild annoyance,

“I told you we were getting booze. What, did you think they’d just sell it to us? — It's bullshit that they wouldn’t if you ask me, but of course, these are the laws of our land —” 

“What about your fake ID?!” Ed snaps.

“Dog ate it.” 

“What _fucking_ dog—” This isn’t happening. 

Greg chuckles and cocks his head in Dolcetto’s direction, to which he reacts by lifting both hands in the air,

“Yeah, yeah, okay. That one actually happened; I live with a pack of dogs and not all of ‘em are trained, so.”

“You still owe me an entire wallet, by the way.” Greg answers.

Ed hopes he doesn’t look too hysterical. It’s a miracle he hasn’t passed out all day without a single meal to go on, it’s a miracle Martha didn’t drive them into a ditch on the way here. It’s a miracle that moths and wasps and mosquitoes still make it out alive in this shit weather and fly around like it’s nobody’s business. 

“Alright, so. You want anything or not? It’s _free_.” He sing-songs. “Also, it’s your payment for being such a decent alibi.” 

Ed pauses.

“Alib—“ 

“Of course! I mean, we always need to have a plan B in case our quest goes awry; that bastard pig Bradley’s got it out for me ever since that fight at _Dublith’s_ — which I didn’t even have anything to do with, by the way —“ Martha and Dolcetto hum in determined agreeance. 

“Fuckin’ cops.” She mutters.

“Anyway, he’s got it out for pretty much all of us. He hates Dolcetto ‘cause he despises all wops equally—“

“— Hey, hey, you don’t get to say it either.” He cuts in,

“— Martha for vandalizing the station’s back wall a year ago—“ 

“Allegedly.” She remarks. 

“And me, well, I don’t get all the hate, he’s probably just jealous of my lifestyle, ya know?” 

Ed cannot compute why _anyone_ would want to do anything to climb further up the list of Officer Bradley’s “Most Hated Punks In The Area”. 

The man’s got a straight-up swastika tattoo on the crook of his neck, barely concealed by his blue uniform, and either the police force in this district doesn’t give a single flying fuck about why that might be problematic, or… Well, yeah, that’s probably it. 

The point is, he’s scary. Ed isn’t prone to let himself be easily intimidated, but he isn’t stupid either — he can make exceptions for when it comes to the one-eyed white supremacist that’s running loose with a tactical 9mm Glock attached to his belt. 

“... Anyhow, a man’s got to procure for his friends.” Greg continues, “But we can’t risk getting pinched tonight, so if it comes to that, the official story is we were with you all night, playing some cards, or solving newspaper sudoku — whatever it is prodigal children spend their time on. They’ll believe it, of course — you’re about the only honors class student I know on a five-mile radius, and honor students don’t tell lies.” He laughs. 

“He’s the only honors class student you know, full stop.” Martha interjects as her right hand goes to turn the ignition while she lights a cigarette with her left. 

Dread steadily fills his chest. Realistically, he knows they’ve all got a certain degree of white privilege on their side in case the pigs _do_ show up — he still didn’t sign up for this, even if the same thing goes for the entirety of his short-lived existence — or just, y'know, _brief._ His young, concise, cursory, shit-show, clusterfuck of a life. He never signed any forms. 

“Alright, then. Let’s get this party started!” He taps the car top, “Last chance, Elric! Anything? Sour patch kids? Vodka? Hershey’s chocolate syrup? No?” He says while re-arranging the sock with holes on his face and receding towards the store. Then jogging — and then they’re both inside the store and the car’s moving to round the block.

“Wanna come up here?” Martha asks, “This might be your only chance to snatch the front seat.” 

Ed swallows. Fuck, he’s pissed right now. And scared shitless. 

Life really changes in a blink. 

“They’re…, Not going to die, are they?” He says while climbing up front if only to get his hands busy on something other than biting through his fingers. 

Martha blows out a thin, long string of smoke and grins, “Nah, most of the shit you hear about Mr. Hawkeye is bullshit. He’s usually blackout drunk before nine and doesn’t even bother with turning the security cameras on. Or he forgets — and that’s on _weekdays_. Point is, those two idiots just like making a big show out of it.” 

“Yeah well, I heard he carries grenades in his pocket.” 

Martha puts both hands on the task of steering the car to a sharp left, where they arrive at the back entrance of the store.

“Ooh — you heard about that story where he threatened a little kid with it, huh?” She muffles while holding the cigarette between her teeth. “It wasn’t functional, but yeah. Some cursed shit right there.” 

Ed nods, he has to suppress the urge to bring his knees up to his chest and grind his eye-sockets against them. He knows but bits and pieces about that man's level of ‘unhinged’, and it’s almost like a terrifying folk-tale people spew and whisper along the halls behind Riza’s back. 

Kids are advised to stay away, high schoolers graffiti the storefront with nasty doodles of the old man fucking a trash can and the words ‘schizo’ on the top. Others depict him coughing up a lung — because having emphysema is apparently _hilarious_. 

Ed doesn’t think he’d be able to stand life under such a spotlight. It’s fucking cruel. He already knows enough about living with big labels stuck to him; he’s the _orphaned kid_ , the _burn victim_ , the _probably-gay- but-who-the-fuck-knows_ weirdo who gets ridiculously high test scores and make people realize that a 6.0 GPA is a thing that can happen. He presses his eyelids shut. 

It doesn’t really mean anything, and what he knows about Berthold Hawkeye isn’t telling — he knows only about a shadow of a man, spending endless nights under tungsten white light and stacking freezers full of beer. Alone.

He wonders how Riza survives, and suddenly his own living situation doesn’t seem so dire. He wants to apologize to someone for so constantly forgetting that he hasn’t got it as bad as it could get. He wants to apologize to the trees and the lonesome strands of grass that come out of the cracks on concrete sidewalks. To the first breath of stark cold air he gets to take every day before the sun comes up. 

He knows he can’t really complain. 

“Yeah, well, that was before the missus passed away. Now he’s been living in rock bottom for the better part of ten years — I’d be surprised if he can even manage the safety lock in an average gun.” She snickers then parks the car but keep it running. 

Ed keeps his eyes glued to his lap as several moments pass, only filled by the faint sound of cigarette paper burning up as she takes her last drags.

“What, you scared of ‘im?” She says.

He shakes his head “It’s just really sad.” The crickets have come out, too, and they sing through the darkness as the engine keeps on sputtering smog. 

He feels her eyes on him even though he dares not turn to face her. 

Several _more_ moments pass like that, and he begins to wonder if feeling compassion for the mentally ill is socially acceptable amongst people his own age. 

She exhales after a while, like someone just gave her awful news. 

“I guess.” 

Any further thoughts get shattered by the distinct sound of a glass breaking in the distance. Ed shoots up as Martha hisses and her body goes stiff, she goes for the stick and locks it into ‘drive’, waiting.

Hurried voices fill the air, Ed squints, and manages to make out two figures hobbling about in the dark. Very painfully long seconds pass until Greg and Dolcetto actually reach the car — they throw the night’s winnings in through the open window and then Greg literally dives into the back seat through it before pulling Dolcetto in with him a split second after. The car is already moving as their locked cursing goes on,

“Let’s go, let's go, go!” Greg hisses. 

“Shit shit shit _shit_ ” Dolcetto adds.

The tires screech at the same time the back door they’ve just come out of is pushed open once more.

“Shit! Go!” Both of them yell even though they’re already moving.

“What the fuck happened?” Martha demands as Ed turns to face the back window — there’s a person walking out onto the middle of the street, but they move too fast for it to be an elderly man.

“Hawkeye Junior.” Greg utters an out of breath chuckle, “Just our luck.” 

“Riza?” Ed asks in disbelief. He keeps staring back, the figure stands still mid-street as more distance is put between them. Just their luck indeed, everyone knows Riza sometimes takes over the store on weekends, but it’s unusual, to say the least. 

“The fuck? She’s never h—“ The air ripples as something pierces into hollowed metal at the trunk; it’s a particular sound, it can’t be anything but—

“ _Fuck_! Take a turn” Dolcetto screeches.

Martha obliges and the whole world tilts sideways. The entire Earth _flinches_. 

“She shooting?!” 

The cacophony of swirling paranoia caused by their fleeing from an apparent life-or-death situation is mildly interrupted by the sound of a plastic wrapper opening, Ed then focuses on Greg, who’s helping himself into a bag of chips.

The car retreats further into the night on an empty road as their collective breathing gathers itself from the jump-scare received. 

“Let's just relax, if she wanted us dead,” He says while stuffing his face, “we’d already be.” he once again looks at a baffled Ed, who might rip the seating off in a second if he grasps it any tighter. He grins through a mouth-full. 

“I mean, gal’s a hell of a shot.” 

*

His head is still swimming well after the world has finally stopped pirouetting around a changing axis. His mouth is still dry, his hands shaking even though he digs his fingernails into his palms to try and keep himself together.

“Man, she got my plate!” He hears Greg say from behind, he turns to see him walking towards the side of the car he’s leaning against and bring it up to show an indeed very-much-pierced licence plate. There’s a perfectly round little hole punched right in the middle lines of the letter ‘V’ in the word “D3V1L”. 

_A warning shot._ He doesn’t know if he feels terrified or, like, super impressed. Greg wasn't kidding

He knows his legs are ready to give in and he doesn’t get how in the fuck he's being so calm and unbothered by it. 

It’s impossible for her to have made him out in the dark, but he still doesn’t feel too strongly about having to face Riza in second-period Chemistry come Monday morning. 

“C’mon, kid. You’re not still angry at us are you?” He says. 

Ed weakly shakes his head. How could he be angry at anyone but himself, really? He’s been getting sloppy as of late, he didn’t use to trust people so easily… To let himself be dragged places without resistance, as eager as a fucking lapdog. To please. To be liked. Petted.

He internally shudders.

But this is Greg; he should have known better. The fact that he’s been the only one not to hurt or humiliate him somehow back at the house doesn’t mean he actually wants to be friends. 

What the hell is wrong with him? It’s not like he daydreams about them being close. This is just how he operates. 

He hears Greg sigh while staring down at the floor, absentmindedly kicking some rubble around, he hears him reach into the car and walk up to him —

To press an inflated bag against his chest.

“Eat up, before the vultures come.” He says.

It’s a trail mix with chocolate in it and Ed stares at it dumbly for a minute. _It doesn’t have any raisins._

“I also got you soda — shit, I got heaps, didn’t know which one you like. There’s ginger ale and that orange-flavored stuff back here.” He chippers. 

Ed blinks, then nods after a while. Greg huffs through a lopsided grin and pats his shoulder once before retreating towards where the others are, at the sides of a long-since abandoned railroad.

“Thanks for coming through, man.” He says, “I think he also gets some Alice for that, right?” He yells back, Marta throws a thumb up in the air and Dolcetto grins at him. 

“Hell yeah, come over here — it’s a guaranteed bad trip.” 

But soon all he can hear is his own ravenous munching and soon, he’s tilting the bag over his mouth to finish it off. Soon, he’s downing half a liter of orange soda and going for the fast-melting cornetto that someone left on the headboard — not before asking if anyone wants it, Dolcetto says _“have at it”_ while using an elongated stick as a sword and slicing through the night’s air — as their distant chatter lull him into something like calm. Greg starts throwing cans and empty bottles over the tracks as the other two cheer him on.

A smile comes through, without Ed’s permission. 

_Fuck_ , he was starving. 


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh boy, sorry about the delayed update. It was my birthday on the 30th and I got trashed, so I've been kind of inoperative. 
> 
> A lotta stuff goes down in this chapter, so here go some warnings; mentions of a minor character death via overdose, mentions of sexual harassment, a more-or-less detailed account of medical neglect, and physical abuse that includes the misuse of toxic household products. 
> 
> I did not hit the Graphic Violence tag because I don't feel as if it's too detailed or explicit, however, if you’d rather skip that part, or have any issue with domestic violence in general, you can stop reading after the first ‘*’ and go all the way to the end, where there’s a breath of relief and the hurt/comfort tag really shines brightest. 
> 
> Last but not least a huge thanks to the amazing [OkaySky](https://archiveofourown.org/users/OkaySky) for betaing this wreck :)
> 
> Enjoy!

“… So she ended up getting it right between her tits, like, in the middle of her chest plate. I tried warning her about the pain but you know how she is,” Greg rambles while single-handedly packing himself a bowl of weed as his other hand is at the steering wheel — mad skills one acquires while living independence to its fullest. He maintains the fallout on his lap to a bare minimum. 

Ed nods along because it’s what he does best when interacting with this specific foster sibling.

“… and the rest is history, now she has that snake tattoo that makes it look like she belongs to a cult. I thought it looked pretty mean as a finished product, so that’s the story of how I ended up getting the same one.” He shows off the red ink on the back of his hand. 

“Now it actually looks like you’re a sect,” Dolcetto deadpans as he leans towards the front seat. 

“Yeah, well, that’s also why she won’t acknowledge me in public. The asshole.” He chuckles and brings the pipe between his teeth. 

The first morning birds are starting to come out. Ed places his elbow on the window’s edge and presses his fingers against the upper part of it’s frame as a chilled dawn breeze blows into the car. 

A fat blob of smoke leaves Greg’s mouth in that same practiced manner every fourteen-year-old used to revise when first introduced to the world-renowned gateway drug of marijuana. Hollowed cheeks, rounded lips. Thinking one looked cool-as-fuck. 

It swiftly disappears back into his mouth with a sharp inhale. 

“So, how’s work treating ya,” he segways while holding it. 

“S’fine I guess.” He knows what Greg means. Although he’d call it a ‘semi-illicit gainful hobby’ more than _work_ -work. He also fails to mention that a certain Ling Yao may or may not be in the process of whipping out the legal paperwork needed to patent said hobby and force him into exploitative labor at random parties. 

“I heard —“ he says through the strain of keeping the smoke in, “ — Russell Tringham was dealing some pretty nasty crystal. That he was cutting it with some fuckin’ sugar.” He scoffs and exhales.

Ed runs his tongue against the back of his teeth. He wishes.

“Red phosphorus.” And lithium metal. And codeine.

Amongst quite the assortment of things Ed had become aware of during his little testing adventures and only sometimes wishes he didn’t know. 

Greg clicks his tongue. “See, that’s why I don’t deal outside of big pharma; they’re professional folk, never mess up the formula.” 

Ed hums.

“I heard that chick who OD’d last year was taking that kid’s stuff, what was her name?” 

“Rose,” Ed says, probably a bit too quickly. There goes his left hand, clenching around empty air. Here comes a memory he hadn’t thought of in a while. 

He greets it reluctantly. 

“Shit was fucked,” Dolcetto mutters. 

“Yeah, that’s right around the time you started doing your thing, right Ed? Offering your noble services to this community.” Greg elbows him without taking his eyes off the road. They’ve been driving in circles for the better part of five hours while White Wedding came on more than three times, he’s sure. Martha is in the back seat taking a long, hard look at the nuances of the skin on her palms. 

Ed’s glad he repeatedly refused the tab they repeatedly offered him; psychotropics aren’t his thing. He doesn’t speak from experience here, but he also doesn’t want to get it. He once read that people with certain types of OCD, depression, or accumulated childhood trauma don’t fend well in the clawing depths of audiovisual hallucinations. He believes that article. 

Besides, that’s not really the reason he consumes anything, drugs haven’t ever been about having fun. He takes a wild guess and assumes that’s how it is for most people, too. 

“Seemed like a good idea,” He says. 

Rose’s death hit him like a ton of bricks. 

He remembers the day they all found out. It was first period calculus and he had gotten up for what felt like the sixth time to use the electric sharpener on the table by the wall because his tip kept breaking off. He remembers the crackling static that came through the classroom speakers to woefully report her passing. 

Rose Thomas. Seventeen. Scored some ice and used by herself in some abandoned building and died alone. 

It hit him like someone dropped a tail piano on him from a ridiculous height; only no hilarity ensued — no amusing injuries. Just some stale air that stuck to his windpipe. All of it happened because her congregation’s pastor got busted for money laundering and was given forty-plus years in county prison and some people cling too hard to specters of existential hope. 

Russell didn’t seem to worry too much about it. Stupid hair in his eyes; hands in his pockets; crumpled dirty dollar bills for baggies of rat poison. Those sometimes reddish shards of meth that look like they’re muddy pieces of broken glass and Ed returns it to its respective owners with a giant red flag attached to it. 

“It’s free of charge if you just flush this down the toilet,” he’s said to too many people. 

As the fine custom of fucked up fathers would have it, though, Tringham’s dad remains the culinary artist behind their product. The hash slinger who cooks that garbage up in their home’s basement with whatever miscellaneous substances he finds lying around in their grimy garage — detergent or sulfuric acid. 

He did a complete wipe down in time for the police search that followed and had his 12-year-old brother Fletcher introduced to the dealing business as a way to make up for lost profit. 

So Ed still wants to be mad, see. He wants to beat Tringham’s brains out through his nose. He wants to not-so-politely ask why he’d sell that amount to a girl who’d never so much as touched a cigarette in her life. 

To this day he scours his mind for actual rage and untapped resentment, but he finds nothing beyond some sort of bland sympathy that feels a lot like that tired breeze that blows through the treetops after a storm is down to its drizzle. He grinds his teeth every time they pass each other in long, squeaky halls, but it’s more like a knee-jerk reaction. 

He swallows, and his spit tastes like acid going down as he idly wonders if she had a painful death. 

Back then, he only stood mid-classroom as scattered gasps filled the air, someone snapped their head at him and uttered a sharp “Shh” — only then did he realize he hadn’t taken his pencil out of the whirling sharpener, and it’d eaten half of it while he stared at the speaker on the upper corner of the room. 

He looked over at where Rose usually sat, right in front of him. An empty desk. Then a minute of silence during assembly. 

He wasn’t dreaming. 

He remembers Winry held his hand while he cried in her car — or more like bit his lips, clamped his throat shut and pressed his eyelids together in a dragged-out attempt to not cry, but ended up wet-faced and tasting saltwater after a few seconds — parked a block away from his house entrance like they always did. 

“ _I’m sorry, I didn’t know you were close,_ ” she said. They weren’t, not really. A couple of shared classes and polite interactions was all it took for Ed to like her enough. Enough for it to hurt like a scalding rod was entering his chest plate. 

He’s thankful Greg and Dolcetto drop the subject. Because it so turns out, none of that matters anymore. It stopped mattering the moment there was nothing left to be done about it. 

They leave him at Dante’s cracked doorsteps at around 5:15 am. Greg wishes him luck and sends Luisa his regards. 

“Pass the message on,” he says while flicking him off. 

“I’m not doing that,” Ed answers. He’s about to turn to leave when Martha’s hands snake out from the back seat and grab both his hands to pull him inches from her face. 

He stumbles against the door as her left hand shoots up to touch his head, and before he can get a word in she’s carding her fingers through his hair. His ponytail came undone at some point during driving around with the windows rolled all the way down. He stills. 

“Wow…” she says while bringing loose strands closer for inspection. She looks absolutely entranced. Kid-in-a-candy-store level of fascinated. 

“Someone’s still high.” Greg snorts.

“Has your hair always been so… _Yellow?_ And damn it’s soft….”

“Uh… ” he starts. 

“Dolcetto, look. You gotta feel this.” Ed looks beside her to appreciate his positively passed-out companion, bottle still in hand. 

“Alright, alright, let him go,” Greg intercedes after a couple of very, very long seconds in which Ed is waging an ambitious battle against the instinctive warming of his cheeks. He hates himself. 

“By the way, Ed, you running low on anything? I got some Oxy a coupla days ago,” he offers. “I know uppers are more your thing, but there’s also some Roxicet around here.” He motions towards the glove compartment. “I could get you the friends-and-family discount if you like.” He winks. 

Ed ponders on it for longer than he probably should, his tongue pressed against the floor of his mouth… He thinks of the slow descent, the smooth slide into a cotton-stuffed body, a brain buzzing with giddy relief. 

He somehow ends up saying ‘no thank you’. 

But Greg has offered before. And Ed isn’t stupid, he knows his nerve damage is permanent. He knows it shows. He knows the midnight flare-ups won’t ever go away. He knows all about how the heat snarled and clustered up his tendons to irreversible extent; all of it narrated in the chicken scratch writing of an overworked physician who didn’t really care for explaining himself in clear terms to a ten-year-old. 

Luckily, being incapacitated for so long gave him the free time needed to educate himself in medical jargon as a means of entertainment; _no intranasal fentanyl will be administered until patient is cleared of any respiratory depression concerns_ , roughly translated to ‘You can cry all you want, kid. We’ve got pens to click with insufferable vexation as we resolutely do not waste those top-tier analgesics on stray children who piss the bed.’ 

He got 15mgs of paracetamol every four hours and a change in bandages every whenever-his-on-shift-nurse-would-remember hours. Some were nice, some would sneak him extra-portions of chocolate pudding even if he couldn’t stomach it. They had chipped nail polish and exhaustion drawn around their eyes, but extra blankets for when the room’s recycled AC got too cold. They asked about his day, they made idle conversation while administering injections or removing dead skin with metal tweezers. Things about his favorite color, his favorite animal, his favorite food. They feigned enough interest for him to want to find the words to answer. Sometimes he couldn’t. He twitched and trembled under their hands like a defective wire as days passed seamlessly with only the constant nagging of his body’s pain raking his brain raw. 

Others had ‘perfunctory’ for a second name. ‘Unfeeling Angel of Death’ as a first, probably. 

They’d wait until his dressings were soaked through to peel them off — something which invariably resulted in the gauze knitting itself into mangled tissue, which in turn meant a thankless meeting with the surgical sponge, scouring off the first layer of skin when it was halfway through properly scabbing. 

They’d pull at the IV chord for no reason in particular and jam the oxygen cannula into his nostrils without looking. 

For weeks, they wouldn’t give him any opioids. He didn’t know why they bothered with the Wong-Baker faces pain scale. 

He listened intently to other kids’ relatives and their bedtime stories through the plastic curtains that separated his bed from the adjacent rows. How parents cooed their children to sleep. He counted all the smudged tiles that comprised the blinding ceiling. He cataloged all the odorized detergents they used — aloe, bubblegum, chocolate. All of them triggered his stomach into emptying itself on his lap. Sometimes he got sheet changes right away; sometimes he didn’t. 

When the health practitioners that hovered around his endless martyrdom had enough of that, he finally got 100 micrograms of morphine.

It was as if the skies cleared. As if muscles he didn’t even know he had melted into the mattress with a giant sigh of relief — mustered with the largest breath of air ever taken. The scalding itch that screamed at him from the mangled dermis on his side stopped urging him to dig his nails in. 

The smell stopped being a problem. He started finally getting the appeal of it. He actually laughed at the batshit, smudged-makeup party clowns that volunteered in the pediatrics section every once in a while. 

The pills tasted like candy, felt like heaven, and he looked at the nurse that reeled the medicine tray in with unabashed adoration as the little paper cup was emptied on his mouth. 

Eventually, he felt the ache creeping back in like a bad omen, like the forewarning promise of an endless storm. It sat in the corner of the room, settled over the invisible layer of numbness, and started needling it’s way in — that was when his midnight intake became an actual benediction.

Now, though, it doesn’t give him too much trouble as long as he doesn’t roll his shoulder the wrong way or sleeps in a weird position. Or pisses Lan Fan off. Or walks without looking and has a run-in with opening wooden doors. 

This is what he tells himself — this is what he tells Al. It must be true to some degree, otherwise he wouldn’t be this functional.

That’s definitely how things work. Judging from the way Greg’s eyebrows arch, though, his slight limp probably isn’t as discreet as he thinks it. He’s definitely the target audience for his specialty products. 

Roxicet. 

There must be something worrying about remembering that name with such warmth. 

He sure wishes it wasn’t that obvious.

Before the car drives too far away, Martha sticks her head out and yells back,

_“You’re fucking pretty!”_

And Ed hopes no one got woken up by it. 

Then his mind short-circuits to older men because it’s his most traitorous organ. Older men in slowing cars, sliding windows. Low voices as their tires pull over next to him in murky sidewalks after his late shifts. Workers from the warehouse district, leaving their slavers with ragged haste after twelve hour stints. They say that, too, don’t they? Pretty. 

_Need-a-ride-pretty._

_Could-take-you-dry-pretty._

He swallows after a few minutes of working the spit in his mouth. This really _is_ a shitty neighborhood. 

He takes his boots off and goes inside. 

*

On weekends he makes himself scarce. After his Saturday shift, he usually takes his homework out to the park. He doesn’t mind the skater kids or the people who use the underside of the little stone bridge to shoot up. He takes up a bench that’s not too shit-stained and goes through DNA methylation and gene expression in prokaryotic cells. He does some framework tweaking for his enzyme experiment, going down a checklist of things the Very Serious people of Academia apparently have to fill in; namely the Ethical Considerations bit, where he insists no protein biomolecules were harmed in the process. 

“ _We don’t give extra points for ‘smartass’, you know_ ,” Izumi had told him. 

He’s usually done before it gets too dark and other types of people start coming out to play — the kinds that don’t like minding their own business. He doesn’t really have anything of value anyone could jump off of him, but if it does come to that, he’d probably end up with a switchblade buried in his kidney. 

Plus he doesn’t want to lose his phone, because he also uses the spare time to have hour-long conversations with Al and hold back from word-vomiting how excruciating life without him is. 

He walks back home with several notebooks stacked under his arm at around 6:30, he’ll make it in time to pop some leftover clonazepam and watch the sun go down from his room. The saddest shit in the world. 

Once again, he hopes no ones there. He hopes Dante is asleep or entranced with the Evangelical TV channel where you get to see pastors exorcise people like they’re lizards wriggling around in a soup can. 

He hopes Evie is out tormenting someone else, making public space a widespread menace. One time they got a complaint because she threw a dart into a dog’s ass from a safe distance, which in turn caused it to go haywire on a little kid’s face. Nothing too bad happened, for which she was kind of sad. 

He shudders and hopes Selim is absorbed by his Nintendo and not creepily lurking in the shadows for no fucking reason other than for the sake of being ominous. He hopes Wilson — or Wolf, or whatever — is not currently riding the high of another sugar rush and doesn’t try to jump on his back, insisting that he give him ‘a ride’ upstairs. The brat. 

He seriously hopes Sloan isn’t in one of his moods and shoves him up against the wall because he “can’t get through” a 6-foot wide hallway, causing the impact to break a framed painting of a pretty nondescript flower pot and have Dante squeeze forty dollars out of him while adding to his house-cleaning duties for an entire month. 

God, he actually misses when Greg also lived here. He knows it’s crappy of him to even think it, but he at least took most of their negative attention. It gives him certain peace to think he wouldn’t mind him saying it — he’s incredibly forgiving. Ed still doesn’t get it. 

He takes his key out and turns the knob. He takes his sweater off and leaves it at the free hook on the wall next to him; a probably unwise move that he only grew accustomed to thanks to a gnawing necessity to have the space he lives in feel somewhat homey. He regrets it the minute he hears Evie’s heated voice coming from within, his scars never did sit well with her, and she’s the type to make her opinions heard. 

It smells like someone didn’t take the trash out when it was their turn to do it; the fact that these carpets haven’t been vacuumed since he’s got any memory of them probably doesn’t help, either. 

“— _Telling_ you it was that little shit, Selim saw, right? Didn’t you just say that?” Evie grumbles. 

Silence. 

“Whatever, I was in my room. I didn’t hear anything,” Luisa answers. 

“Psh, I have no doubt about it…” There’s some stomping in the distance. “You know, I heard that jock Roy Mustang beat the shit outta him the other day. Man, I would’ve paid to see those two insects go at it against each other.” She’s almost choking on her own spit as she cackles through the sentence.

Ed scuffs the heel of his boot against the floor mat. This is just what he needed to close the day with a golden brooch. 

He swallows but it sticks. 

Maybe if he’s ultra-quiet about going upstairs… Goddamned creaky floor won’t let it happen. 

Shit. 

There’s no reasoning with Evie when she’s seething in anger and looking to fight, which seems to be all the damn time. That’s about all he knows about her — that and that she was the first to get adopted by Dante at the tender age of five and a half. 

He saw a picture once, taken outside what he guesses was her orphanage. It was before Dante was wheelchair-bound, she walked on a cane and didn’t smile at the camera, so Evie probably took the hint and didn’t either. 

He shudders just to think about the near ten years she spent as her only child before Dante decided hoarding parentless kids was her calling in life. 

He’s snapped out of his thoughts when he hears someone walking. He absentmindedly puts one foot behind the other until his back hits the door, he has to think of an escape route that doesn’t involve going back to the street. He can’t go upstairs without going through the living room, and crossing the kitchen to exit through the spring door next to the sink isn’t really an option unless he plans to squat on the ratty, pigeon-shit-filled backyard until Evie falls asleep, which could take hours. 

He could confront this situation head-on and — die, probably. Wow, his mind is being real helpful today. 

Luckily, when one takes too long to make a fight-or-flight decision, said decision is oftentimes taken for you. 

The wood creaks. His breath sticks to the bottom of his lungs as the floorboards submit to Evie’s feet. She comes towards the foyer and Ed feels the stillness take over him like he’s been suddenly injected with a fast-acting paralyzing agent as she turns the corner and he sees it. 

The intent. The avalanche of pure malice and overwhelming anger coming his way, with such force and precipitation not even God itself could stop it — not even if it wanted to. 

It’s like he leaves his body, he doesn’t really see himself getting spat and yelled at, he doesn’t really make out the words delivered in her hateful voice — just notices that it’s broken up and ragged like a pack-a-day smoker. It catches in her throat with enraged emotion and it bends the air. Her face contorts in ire. 

He feels with extreme acuteness how his skin crawls as she comes near and the door at his back seems too punishing in all it’s hardness, in its glorious indifference. It won’t swallow him — neither will the floor. He doesn’t understand why this is happening, but it is. He knows the reasoning doesn’t matter, and it never will. 

He acknowledges the flash of pain when she brings her open palm to his forehead and slams his head against the door, but at the same time it doesn’t register, perhaps because part of his consciousness jumped ship the moment he walked into the house and saw what was coming. Evie yanks his braid and starts dragging him further into the house, he notices the clock piece as they walk by. It waves at him. 

Things escalate in less than seconds, less than quarter seconds, faster than light, louder than waves breaking on jagged rocks in the formation of the Earth. 

His limbs feel like lead, and it’s all but instinct from this point forward. His tells him to wait, just wait. His body is a vessel, a container, a cage. It feels as though he’s rearranging the atoms in his composition to let her straight through. Like he’s sticking himself to the walls to avoid the passing rampage. Like he’s climbing onto the sidelines until it’s all over. Suddenly he’s on the ground, the heel of her shoe kicking into his ribcage. Again, again, again. She’s screaming something about him being a rat — no, worse than a rat. 

An insect, a sub-human piece of thawed shit — what else is new. At this point it just feels like they’re going through the motions, a theater-piece they’ve learned by hard. He knows it’s better if he doesn’t retaliate, he’s got a pretty decent survival instinct, but she’s absolutely deranged, and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out which volition would win. 

He loses the concept of time and only manages to disconnect all his wires in time for the pain to pass through him like an invisible current of normalcy. But there’s a voice prying in. Luisa’s. He only gets the intonation of her at first — slow spoken, unaltered. 

“Just stop it, Evie, okay? It’s always the same fucking thing with you, I swear.” She’s standing by the kitchen’s entrance. 

Jesus fucking Christ, can’t he get the living shit beat out of him in private? He wants to at least be able to chuckle but there’s not enough air for that. His ribcage feels like it’s jagged ends, threatening to burst into his lungs. Ed regains enough strength to get on his knees. He coughs. 

Evie snarls something about it not being any of her business while pacing in and out of his messed up line of sight. 

He looks over at where Luisa’s standing with her arms crossed, he can practically hear her eyes rolling. 

“You done?” he manages while wiping his cheek with the back of his hand. Big mistake, but — hell, maybe it’s one he won’t live to regret. 

Not a full second passes before Evie’s sturdy hands are at him again, this time she only grabs his hair to pull his face back and when he shuts his eyes there’s an assaulting scent, the hiss of a sprayer can and —

Luisa screams. 

“Stop! Fucking stop!” He hears her stepping around the room. “— Evie, _stop!_ ” 

It burns.

*

He knocks an indefinite amount of times before taking two steps back from the door while viciously rubbing his face against his forearm. 

The sting is making a comeback and he feels his stomach flip inside-out, again — he puked once, about two blocks back, doubled over while hugging a light post and looking like he was trashed at fucking 7 o'clock. 

Maybe he’s going to again, but he has to be quick about it before someone comes to the door — if they come, that is. He has no actual concept of what time it is, it’s dark already and the lights are all off, he distantly remembers her saying something about a weekend trip out of state to resume her epic manhunt for a discontinued stereo piece originally belonging to one of their Packard Caribbean models. He wished he’d paid more attention, in case something exactly like this came to happen.

Maybe she spoke about a road trip and looking forward to the passing scenery but he didn’t listen because he’s a dick and now it’s payback time —

The hinges creak as the door swings open to reveal a very-much-here Winry Rockbell in her trademark working attire — sandals, rolled up overalls and a splotchy white tank-top. He catches a glimpse of her before more resolutely hiding his face in both hands.

“Ed? What the hell? What happened?” 

His throat seizes up. 

“Hey Win, ah, nothing. I mean. Not nothing, just —“ Cough. “It’s kinda messy, but I can’t clean it up there, and th—“ Cough, cough. “I need some — uh, soap? Water, too.” This is a mess of a sentence, he tries motioning around in the hopes that it’ll wordlessly illustrate the actual living hell he just managed to crawl out of with the help of Luisa’s unexpected benevolence — her deceivingly strong arms hauling him up from the ground and opening the door for him, telling him to scram while he could. 

“ _Go to your friends' house, the one with the piercings?_ ” she’d said. 

Ed didn’t have to be told twice, he stumbled down the steps and staggered his way through six darkened, grimy blocks to get here. All while coughing up his lungs and fighting his new state of operative blindness. 

He should’ve rehearsed his lines during that time, he can’t articulate the situation. He should’ve learned sign language. “Evie got pissed at me,” he concludes — because that sentence about says it all. “Don’t tell Granny.” 

“Don’t tell me what?” Because he has terrible timing, Pinako’s voice emerges from behind the door, Winry pushes it wider to reveal her small but ever so imposing frame and Ed feels a pang of guilt upon witnessing her bedclothes. Or what seem to be, anyway, everything’s still a blur. 

“What time’s it?” He asks. He should get a fucking wristwatch already. 

This is probably the rudest thing he’s ever done, but he doesn’t get time to wallow in his own guilt before Winry’s hand encircles his wrist and yanks him inside. The door slams, he flinches.

“Now what did the fuckers do?” she demands. Her eyes twinkle with determination in the low light but Ed can’t stop having at least one hand on eye-rubbing-duty, so he doesn’t manage to focus his sight on her. 

His eyeballs feel like they’re being raked out of his face or melted with a blowtorch or something in between. His nostrils still burn. 

“What’s… What’s that smell?” she continues, with no small amount of alarm.

“S‘secticide,” he mumbles, looking at the ground. The floors here are of a pleasant light mahogany. 

He could have specified. 

Raid. Insect killer. Ant, roach and earwig. Cyfluthrin and organophosphate. All inside his mouth, his nose, his throat. Charring him raw and needling from the inside out. 

“Oh Lord, I’ll get the medical kit,” says Pinako, and it rolls off her tongue like the practiced sentence that it is. 

He’s also got a savings fund dedicated to paying this family back for all of the first-aid supplies they’ve used up on him over the years. The sole reason he’s survived this long without health insurance is called Rockbell Women. 

“Winry, get some milk from the kitchen,” she adds. “If there’s any cartons in the cupboard bring one, the cold won’t do him any favors.” 

“'Preciate it but ‘m not really in the —“ he hiccups, “mood for dairy —“ he says while viciously jamming his fingers up and down and around his eyes. 

“It’s for your face, pinhead. Lactose helps with irritation,” she punctuates as Winry takes off and disappears around a corner. She leaves, too, her steady, measured steps making their way around the living room.

A dim yellow light comes from the small Tiffany glass lamp placed on a wooden table. It’s not too harsh for his battered retinas. 

He’s left with only the sound of a distant clock ticking. He looks over at Pinako once she comes back, little white box in hand, and opens his mouth. His tongue feels like an actual stone, but he has to say it. 

“I’m sorry.” 

Her mouth is stilled in a tense line, the seriousness of her expression punctuated by the way the light hits her left; this woman has seen him through some shit. 

Yet the fact that she hasn’t snitched on him, as per his own request, by taking any of this to the authorities puts him at enormous ease. This is about the only instance in which his agency hasn’t been stripped from him for being a minor. She’s reticent to, but she trusts his judgment. 

And she orders him to come straight here whenever things get, er, complicated, as she likes to put it with a hint of well-deserved satire. 

He can’t believe this woman lets him call her ‘Granny’, encourages it, even. And he knows she means it wholeheartedly, but every time some shit like this happens, it feels like the bond slips away. Like he’s pushing their limits to unacceptable extents. Like it’s finally going to be too much and one of these days, they just won’t open the door. 

Honestly, he’d get tired of his bullshit, too. 

But Pinako clicks her tongue. “Now, don’t be ridiculous, Ed,” she chastises. “Why don’t you come sit over here instead of loitering in my hallway. And stop rubbing at your eyes unless you want to blind yourself.” 

He kind of whimpers at that, because he’s pathetic, but obeys and follows her in. There’s two ample and extremely comfortable brown couches placed on a ninety degree angle, shelves overstocked with a myriad of different books, and a low table whose every inch is occupied by either scraps of newspaper, half-emptied porcelain cups of tea, or screws and wrenches. He takes in the familiar smell of aged wood and tobacco while sitting down. He hadn’t realized how cold he was, the weather lately seems to be getting as dire as it can; mildly cold in the mornings, boiling hot by noon and downright inhospitable after the sun goes down. 

His departure was anything but graceful, and the whole fighting-for-his-life while being chased around by a maniac with an insecticide can didn’t exactly give him time to put his sweater back on before being pushed out the door. 

His body’s still shaking in the wake of it. He remembers the first rounds of spray Evie emptied on him as he tried crawling away, pushing himself back on the heels of his hands. The burning sensation cut through all thoughts like a searing needle punctured deep into his skin, past the layers of fat and muscle. Straight to the bone. 

He tried thinking of something else to distract from the itch scraping at his dermis. Al, Trisha, sunrises, kittens, the meatloaf Sig cooked for him last time he and Izumi had him over for dinner. He couldn’t. 

“So what happened, huh?” Granny asks blankly. He knows she isn’t irritated, at least a part of his brain does. A small, weak, insignificant and outnumbered section of his battered brain. The rest belongs to the jurisdiction of a cruel, tyrannic, unrelenting voice that sneakily suggests for him to notice her voice inflection — how particularly annoyed it sounds. Tired and unsurprised. 

He shrugs, and the sentiment is honest. He doesn’t know how to explain this knack he has for shutting down in the face of adversity and how that invariably results in all pieces of outside information getting lost in the air. 

He doesn’t think Evie needs thorough, logical reasoning for wanting to beat the living dog shit out of him.

He also knows there’s a joke to be told here — one about her getting quite literal with the whole calling him an ‘insect’ shtick because his home life very frequently feels like he’s part of a mediocre late-night sitcom, only he never hears the gag-reel, and all his scenes are the ones that don’t make it to the final cut.

“If only I’d known we had that much pesticide lying around, I woulda used it on my room ages ago,” he says, and kind of wants to pat himself on the back for getting through the sentence without retching once. 

Winry comes back with a small bowl, two towels and the aforementioned damned milk. She also places a bar of soap in his hands. 

“Has anyone ever actually told you that you’re funny?” she asks; it’s energetic and indignant. 

“I don’t think so.” He hiccups again. “No.” 

“That’s good. They wouldn’t have been doing the world any favors by wanting to protect your ego,” She goes on. “Go wash your face, do it as thoroughly as you can and use lukewarm water. How much does it hurt right now?” she asks while crouching over him. 

Ed doesn’t feel brave enough to meet her eyes. 

“On a scale from one to ten?” Winry insists. 

“Seven.” 

She nods once, then nudges him towards the guest bathroom. He does his best without getting a glimpse of what the mirror has to show him and comes back to a milk-soaked towel, Pinako has him lay down on the couch and cover his face with it and the contact feels like the closest he’s ever been to absolution.

He wishes he were here on a social call and not as a direct result of his never-ending misfortune. 

He has to tuck his lips into his mouth if he plans on getting through this without accidentally tasting that damn cow-fluid. 

After a few minutes, he has to quickly toss it over his head and double over himself to vomit; he doesn’t want to soil the couch or floor with his stomach’s contents, even though it’s mostly bile at this point. Suddenly, though, and before anything actually comes out, an empty trash can materializes in front of him and he’s so grateful he could cry. He retches for several more minutes as someone holds his hair for him. 

He tastes the sickening Raid odorant coming out of his every pore as his throat clenches around the lasting sting of it. 

“You’re intoxicated,” Pinako tells him. “It’ll probably be best if we take you to an actual doctor, first thing in the morning. We could drive you now but Dr. Marcoh’s probably not in at this hour.”

He’s still spitting out acrid saliva and trying to catch his breath while shaking his head inside the container as he says, “No.” Breath, spit, shudder. 

“No, it’ll be fine.” His voice sounds like a mummy was brought back to life and smoked through two packs of Camels. “It feels better after th-throwing up.”

“Don’t be an idiot,” Winry cuts in, she tucks a few strands of hair behind his ear. “You’re not dying on us. Marcoh used to work with my parents. He’ll fix you up for sure — and no, before you say anything, he won’t charge us a penny. We’ll call in as a favor, right Gran?” Pinako grunts affirmatively in the distance. 

Ed only groans in response, he’s staring at a pit of his own puke, and it feels like a moment of great contemplation. It’s all pills and orange juice. His stomach apparently doesn’t get the memo about there not being anything to throw up anymore, because it keeps clenching. Obstinate. Painful. 

“He’s the one who saw me when I got chicken pox at freaking twelve. I was practically dying because I didn’t wanna go to the doctor either.” His hair is suddenly lifted from around his face as she secures it with one of her own elastic bands, her hands don’t leave his head as they slide through his scalp in a repetitive motion. “I’d read in one of my mom’s books that those marks can leave faint scarring if not treated properly, and I remember thinking, y’know, for some weird-kid reason, that it’d be super cool to have it leave little dot-shaped marks all over my body. Kind of like a jaguar.”

Ed lets out a shaky laugh in between his dry-heaving, Winry laughs, too. 

His is pained, hers is wary. 

“S-see?” he starts, “Wanna take me to the man w-who ruined your childhood dreams.” 

“And now it’s time for him to ruin yours. So shut it.” 

He tries answering something snarky and it gets caught up in the middle of his throat, another round of puke chokes him off, followed by a couple of pained whimpers that bounce off the walls around Winry and Pinako’s not-so-silent grimacing. Her hand doesn’t stop rubbing circles on his back, though. 

He must’ve been a civil rights activist in a past life, because the karmic energy needed to deserve someone like Winry is too huge. 

Maybe hours pass after that, with his head rested on her lap and the milk-soaked towel draped over his eyes as his labored breathing fills the room. Pinako retreated to her room a while ago, telling them to wake her if anything else came up, like, say, ‘the war of the worlds’. She flicked an old radio on her way upstairs and left them to the sound of muffled advertising. 

Winry shoos Den away every time he comes close to sniff Ed’s skin and cards her calloused fingers through his tangles. 

Sleep starts taking him under, he swims in and out of consciousness to the gentle pressure of her digits on his scalp and the vibration of her voice when she suddenly asks,

“Can I re-do your braid tomorrow?” 

He absentmindedly hums in affirmation. 

He doesn’t add that he’d like that very much, that it would make his day, his week, his month. That he looks forward to living through the night just so that can happen. 

His body still mildly trembles, it doesn’t believe that it’s reached some kind of safety, so every now and then he involuntarily jolts. Winry shushes him back to a state of semi-peacefulness and doesn’t ask him to recount what happened. At some point, he sinks straight through the broadcaster’s voice and into someone else’s. Another man, one dressed in a dusty old brown suit, making the plastic seat from the row behind him creak as he spread himself down.

“ _Sir? Please, sir, Dr. Knox will receive you when he’s ready. It shouldn’t take long. Sir, could you please wait outside, this is an inpatient area only._ ”

“Dr. Knox, huh. Well that sure is music to my ears. Just tell him that the original has finally come to visit, I’m sure he won’t be bothered by me being here.”

“Sir, please —”

“I’m clean, I won’t be any trouble.” Ed saw two hands lifted in the air from the corner of his eye. “This young lad can vouch for me, right?” 

The receptionist didn’t bother looking at him — he was grateful. The Flintstones were on, a small, busted plasma attached to the wall, a screen that occasionally stuttered. He didn’t mind it. One of the nurses had been nice enough to wheel him out into the common area with a blanket draped over his lap and the oxygen tank parked next to him. Wilma’s voice was occasionally enough to distract him from the slight jingling his ragged chair did through the force of his body’s shaking. 

At some point, the phone on the main desk rang and the woman hesitantly turned on her heels after eyeing the man behind him with disapproval. 

The man leaned into the seating behind Ed. He reeked of cigarette smoke. 

“Thanks for that, kid.” He said through some mysterious chewing, his voice sounded beyond exhausted and unamused. “Here, you want some?” A scrunched up plastic bag appeared next to his face, it looked like some sort of candy. He thought he remembered, in a detached sort of way, that you weren’t supposed to just accept these kinds of offerings. 

On the other hand, it looked like chocolate. 

Ed side-eyed him before warily nodding. It’d been ages since he last had anything sweet, the watered-down gelatins that passed for dessert in the hospital’s menu most definitely did not count. The bag began to tip towards him — only then did he realize moving was going to prove challenging. He’d taken his last round of bullshit anti-inflammatories hours ago and the familiar strain of aching tendons was beginning to settle in. His arm and leg were prickling with discomfort that was guaranteed to turn into a caustic tingle. Any minute now. 

The man in thin glasses looked at him from over the bridge of his nose.

He wordlessly threw a couple of chocolatey pebbles into his open palm and brought it up to his chest. Ed mumbled something that sounded like a ‘thank you’. He wasn’t used to talking either, these days. Soon, he’d be a complete animal that reeked of antiseptic — keening, crying, coughing, whimpering, putting his fingers in his mouth and biting down, but very rarely using his words. 

“You met fire, huh,” the man said as he took some more and pressed his palm over his own open mouth. “That must hurt like crazy.” Ed stared ahead, at animated people who’d never know about his existence. 

He gingerly brought the chocolate up to his mouth as the TV screen kept filling the gaps of silence he left. 

“I’ve seen a lot of patients with injuries similar to yours, in my time. I’m not gonna lie, it’s a trial, but eventually, you’ll be more than okay.” he said. "It shouldn't take more than a few more months of this boring place."

“Y-you’re a doctor?” he asked, barely above a whisper. The question passed through his mouth without giving him a chance to think twice. 

No one had spoken to him with conversational intent in… a while. Perhaps he shouldn’t have presumed this man actually wanted him to talk. He seemed like the kind of person who could’ve grumbled and complained to the wall beside him if Ed hadn’t been there. The kind who, in addition to that, didn't like children. 

The man laughed, though. A clipped, bitter laugh. “That is what my degree says I am, sure.” 

Ed made a face once his teeth got through what was apparently nothing but a front of chocolate and discovered a nasty surprise raisin underneath. 

“I work as a coroner. You know what that means?” he asked. Ed shook his head, trying to hide his distaste by forcefully swallowing the half-chewed, half-melted candy in his mouth. 

“It means I work with dead people,” he said. 

Ed nodded.

“You ain’t scared by it?” he said, eyeing him impassively. 

Ed shook his head and the man chuckled, only this time like he meant it. 

“Oh boy, you sure look like the brave type. Your parents must be real proud of you, am I right?” 

Ed shook his head again. 

“And why’s that?” The man insisted, although he didn’t add any of that forced pep most adults used when speaking to children. 

“They’re dead people,” he answered. He tried tonguing the insides of his mouth clean. He heard the seat behind him creak under the man’s weight. He saw Pebbles Flintstone crawling around her house. 

There’s suddenly some soft sniffling that pokes at the space around him, he slightly shifts. 

“Win…” he starts. Her left hand is on his shoulder and she squeezes lightly. “Winry, ‘r you cryin’?” he asks, sluggish, momentarily pulled from his stress-induced slumber. 

She sniffs once and clears her throat. 

“No. Just go to sleep,” she says, her voice shaky, he’s never heard her like this. He shifts again, this time more decided, he turns his head to try and face her but only sees the darkness on the back of his lids. It’s probably better this way.

“Wha’s wrong?” he asks, it comes out slurred and his voice still feels like it’s chafing his windpipe.

“Nothing. Sleep.” She pats his forehead, and it should feel condescending somehow, but he kind of likes it. 

Then he turns his head sideways and muffles a groan into her lap. He hears a stifled swear.

“Jesus, does it still sting?” she asks. 

He shakes his head. “Mmgh.” 

“Damn it — maybe we should call Dr. Marcoh now instead of waiting any longer —“

“— No. No, c’mon it’s like… Three am...” He whines, as opposed to admitting that he is straight-up afraid of doctors and that the smell of disinfectant makes him want to die. 

“Ed, it’s five in the morning,” she answers.

“Oh…” Shit. Her fingers are still entangled in his hair. Did he seriously keep her up all night? 

She sighs wetly after a moment. 

“Winry, don’t cry,” he says, voice low and uncertain. 

“I’m not,” she answers.

“Winry…” He reinstates. 

“ _What._ ” She exhales and her breath tousles his hair, a wave of warmth. 

“Thank you.”

A beat passes. The clock’s eternal ticking. Den’s distant shuffling. The sounds of a nice house — a safe one. 

Her fingers shift and he feels her gently tug at his hair. He hears what it means, 

“ _Shut up._ ” 

He obliges.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> if you have anything to say, jot it down here in the comments section, you've got my undivided attention


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *Arrives panting* here goes, thank you so much for the ongoing interest and support! I hope the following chapter is of your liking. 
> 
> Edit: The following chapter is turning out to be potentially controversial in a way I did not anticipate -- in that I didn't really take what's written to heart. In order not to overextend this introduction I'll just dive into a few clarifications 1) The views and theories expressed below aren't meant to be taken in earnest and don't represent these characters as a whole 2) I have no intention of driving this plot into a propaga-driven stick in the mud, but rather I took the opportunity to satisfy my 16-year-old's frustrated desire to have the academic tools with which to speak up in situations where the content revised in class was very conservative and my teacher was a proper ass 3) It is NOT meant to be center stage to the story or coercive towards any worldview, rather a means to explore doctrinaire attitudes, as well as abuse and intimidation through teacher-student power imbalances. 
> 
> Cw: suicidal ideation, depression.
> 
> Thanks again to OkaySky for the beta <3 :)

Bluff. 

That’s always been his one true calling. Talk a salesman’s ear off, sell ice to a desert snake, argument his way out of a reckless driving ticket or twenty. Those were a few of the things that, while not exactly his favorite, Roy Mustang could at the very least always count on. 

Attempting to transition from the out-loud reading of his written answer to question number 6, into a mini speech about the rightful fight against bourgeois capitalism in Mr. Kimblee’s class, though, was proving less than successful an endeavor. 

It could be a common enough misconception to think he didn’t really care for Theodore Roosevelt’s failed negotiations during The Great Anthracite Coal Strike from 1902, Roy assumes, but he surely believes there had to be a better way of discussing manual labour at the beginning of the 20th century than Kimblee ridiculing him for his “ _overly-naïve take on the matter, probably based on the fact that a certain someone didn’t bother with the lectures and is now making a fool of himself._ ” 

Roy just liked calling his beliefs a ‘defense of basic human dignity’, but Social Studies 30-1 was nothing if not a place for going at each other’s throats and calling it a civilized dissent expressed through organized dialogue. 

He eventually settled for concealing an eye-roll, mid-term questionnaire in hand and standing at the front of the class while Kimblee made an example out of his “unrealistic” political stands. 

Quarreling with teachers wasn’t something he really cared for at the moment, even if he _could_ have come up with the eloquence needed to further explain his point, for not every day graced him with the same amount of social energy. It still doesn’t. 

But the first time he saw Edward Elric — really saw him, and not just annotated his presence over the edges of his awareness like a footnote, even though, granted, he did underline said footnote with a little emphasis — was when his eyes darted to the blonde sitting at the edge of his seat, dressed all in black and ready to manifest some nerves of steel by dissing Kimblee’s viewpoint as fascistic without a seconds hesitance. 

“But the ability to strike has long since been one of the prevalent — if not, like, the only tool of social dissidence through which not only labour unions, but individual workers have managed to change their shi— uh, terrible conditions and gotten themselves the leverage to negotiate actual living wages. These coal miners ended up settling for half the raise percentage they’d asked for when really, they shoulda been taking over the property altogether — it’s a means of production they themselves keep up and running instead of the slaver who just hoards all the profit without lifting a fuckin’ finger.” He’d went on to say, only seconds later wincing over the curse that’d finally slipped through. 

“Don’t forget to breathe there, bud.” Breda snickered, as did the rest of the class by following his example. 

For a moment, Roy felt like _he’d_ been the one to actually forget how the whole inhale-exhale business went. 

He felt like he’d just witnessed a cataclysm of sublime confection, an avalanche tipping over as Edward’s torso straightened and leaned slightly forward, prompted by the waves of his determined rhetoric — like he’d seen a tsunami about to crash into him, but stopped for a minute to admire the way the light caught and reflected on the creases of crystal-clear blue water, a certain delicacy to the upheaval that he would gladly die staring at… Let it never be said Roy didn’t have a flare for the dramatic. 

The only reason he hadn’t auditioned for _Othello_ last semester had had to do with conflicting schedules. 

He looked over at where Falman sat, wide-eyed and with his eyebrows raised, in a similar way to the time one of the girls in PE referred to him as a “skinny legend.” 

The first time he really saw Edward Elric, was in the moment he took his half-assed written answer about the ‘legitimate struggle’ and polished it into undeniable terms, took it for a spin, crashed it right into Mr. Kimblee’s front porch and then backed up to let him have a good look. 

Most importantly though, he had just thrown himself into the fire over agreeing with what Roy had said. 

Roy could only sort of gawk at the way his eyebrows slightly pinched together as he intoned his indignant ramble; at how they were of a moderately darker shade than that of his hair; at how his hair was mostly tucked into a loose bun at the nape of his neck; at how he suddenly felt the urge to brush some of the free strands that fell over his cheek behind his ear — something that he told himself was an OCD-related impulse more than anything else. 

Kimblee stood impassively next to him, arms crossed and slightly leaned against his desk before allowing a humorless smirk to come through. 

Roy held his breath again. 

“Well, now, that’s interesting… I suppose it does make sense for my foster care student to agree with the concept of socialized goods, doesn’t it?” He said, leaning forward like a feral wolf with presumptuous hand gestures.

Very few people dared laugh at that, others either didn’t get it or felt too bad — so the rest of the group fell into a stale, death-scented silence and Roy’s stomach plummeted to the ground. 

“What say you, class?” He continued, addressing the room at large, “Does the education provided in orphanages actually include Karl Marx in their syllabus, these days? Seems a bit progressive for a government institution, no?” He looked down on Edward, and Roy noticed how the twelve-o-clock light caught on his eyes; he saw a deep molten yellow as his gaze momentarily flickered. Roy caught a creeping shade of pink taking over his features as he decidedly glued his eyes to the ground, his chest clamped up. 

“I think we can at least all agree in that they didn’t teach you much about tasteful language, but that’s hardly your fault. Our school’s charitable integration programme is meant to open our horizons towards more, ah — diverse types of backgrounds, after all,” he concluded, because of course he took it that far. 

Because this was Kimblee; a guy fascinated by the conception of napalm during the Vietnam War. A man dressed like a 1970s mafioso villain. 

He would’ve pushed even further just to see if he could make Edward cry, were it not for the fact that he didn’t want any more beef with the school board. Enough people had dropped the class altogether over the years. His was the kind of course you heard cautionary tales about. 

And nobody had thought to warn him. 

Roy noticed the way Edward’s hands curled in on his lap, clutching at the hem of his sweatshirt, how his right one was for some reason never bare, how he pressed himself against the wall behind him, how he set his jaw in an expression he couldn’t quite place, before opening his mouth and closing it again. Then once again parting his lips while momentarily darting his eyes behind Kimblee, towards where Roy stood in front of the whiteboard. 

Roy caught his gaze just in time to mouth “ _Leave it_ ”, like a cartoon hysterically mimicking a throat slash as a way of warning, when perhaps he should have said something, then — if his clout was ever going to do him any good, that was. 

He heard Breda curse under his breath as he slumped further down his seat and thawed in the room’s tense ambience, he could practically smell the pity in the air. The collective sorrow as everyone diverted their gaze and trickled with their own proxy-embarrassment. Test paper crumpled in his hand. 

No one does public humiliation like Zolf J. Kimblee.

“You should get him a shirt that says ‘Eat The Rich’, that oughta drive your teacher crazy.” Jean chuckles while tapping a brand new pack of Marlboro against his palm. 

“Hard pass.” Roy answers without a second’s doubt. “A third of the class is already spent on Kimblee figuring out new and _exciting_ ways to accost him,” he adds with faux pep. One of those entailed Mr. Kimblee forcing Edward to address him only as ‘Sir’, which made him cringe so hard some of his fingers actually went numb. 

Everything is bad enough as it is. He knows that when Kimblee tries to convince him that there is no hope for the world, what he means is he’ll gladly demonstrate it for him every day. 

And he knows this dynamic has no end — people like Edward Elric will finish off the school year without any complaint beyond the subtle bite in their voice and the slight defiance in their perfunctory completion of all the work because they can’t afford any failing grades. 

People like Kimblee will ooze with the never-ending pleasure that comes with students that have no parents to go knock on a principal’s office with a few strong words about their faculty’s behavior. 

It’s a match made in heaven.

A trio, actually. Because all of this happens while Roy limits himself to the silent bystander-role and tries not to clench his jaw so hard that his molars crack. All of this happens while he slips away into a pure, unaltered, brain-dead sort of entrancement at his classmate’s presence, and it feels as though it’s taking more and more space every day. 

More yellow catches his eye, more black and red, more of the strange ephemerality that accompanies the slight motions of his adjusting in his seat every once in a while, like it pains him to stay in one position for too long. 

“Yo, isn’t coach Armstrong gonna lose his shit if he catches you smoking again?” Breda pushes Jean’s shoulder.

“That’s a pretty big ‘if’, considering my performance never lets him down — what?” He clicks his tongue, “Man, it’s a dumb rule anyway, I’ve been smoking since thirteen, it just don’t affect me like regular people.” 

The 3 o’clock sunlight is coming down hard and merciless as they make their way out of school property. He doesn’t understand how people have the vitality to come out of class practically skipping in this damn weather. Although he doesn’t really wish it were raining, either. He doesn’t like the nagging raindrops that stick to his face and dampen his shoulders, the rumble of distant thunder, nor the bleak, needling wind that drives everyone to shut themselves in. He doesn’t particularly enjoy mild days, in which the sun can’t decide if it wants to come through or not, in which the ambient warmth is damp enough to be noticeable, but not too grave that there’s anything to be done about it. Spring makes him a sneeze-machine. Summer gives him heat-stroke just by opening his windows and looking down at the scalding pavement. Autumn, his seasonal depression. 

That’s really the problem, at the end of the day. He doesn’t like shit — shit doesn’t particularly like him back. 

It’s not always like this, but some days it is. And it’s worse than a hundred busybodies piling in on him with concerns about the openness of his sexuality, the people who can’t live with the realization of him not being “ _Half-straight, half-gay_ ” as some have put it, to which he’s had to drag himself through the interaction and scour his brain for the will to answer “ _More like_ all _bi._ ” 

He remembers a particularly vexing locker-room conversation in which the guy insisted with a particular mark of giggling bigoted amusement, 

“ _Half-gay, half-straight, then._ ” Roy had had to close his eyes to prevent them from spilling over his face with the sheer amount of boredom he’d felt. 

“ _Oh, I believe I’m also like 1/64th Irish._ ” he’d said. 

Well, a hundred thousand years of those impromptu Q&A’s would have nothing on a single day like this one. Where his neurotransmitters cease operations. Where a thin veil drapes over his eyes and dulls all the colors. Where the heat becomes that much more unbearable. 

He long since discarded the grey sweatshirt he wore in the morning and wonders why he ever thought three layers was a good idea; he’s just wearing an open light blue button-up with the sleeves rolled up and a white T shirt underneath — none of which are distinctly cozy garments, but the concept of clothes as a whole is also making him suffer at the moment. 

He drops into the driver’s seat and immediately goes for the highest AC setting, grateful they didn’t have practice today.

“Anyway, so what do—“ 

“— Windows,” Roy cuts in, to which Jean groans and mumbles some affirmative while pressing down the button to let the smoke out. 

“Why are you so picky with me? Your Aunt smokes like a locomotive.”

“Which means I’ve already got enough exposure in my life to get cancer as an unintended smoker. There are no lamer ways to die.” Jean rolls his eyes. 

Also, there’s the fact that Chris would never approve, ironic as it may be. 

“ _You stay away from those things,_ ” she once told him as she rolled the filter between her lips; he was twelve. “ _They’ll kill you, faster than if Speedy Gonzales on cocaine were the grim reaper._ ” she concluded with a flick of her lighter. 

“Anyway,” Havoc goes on, “Why the hell is that kid in our grade in the first place?”

“Advanced placement.” Breda offers while stretching out in the back seat, “He’s one of those “gifted minds” I guess.” He starts yawning. 

“What, like, on the spectrum?” Havoc takes another drag. Breda shrugs. Roy… doesn’t know what to think. He’s heard a lot of things about him. 

He’s diving head-first into an MIT full-ride, some say; an orphanage volunteer gone rouge drenched him in lighter fluid when he was six and lit him up, he’s completely disfigured from the neck down; he straight-up knows Latin; his whole family died in a farming accident; he lives in a house with twelve other kids and they battle-royale each other for food portions every day. 

His arms start to feel heavy. 

“Man, I hear he wears that glove because he’s actually missing his right hand, there’s like a fake plastic one underneath,” Jean continues.

Roy’s hands clench around the steering wheel.

“That’s called a prosthetic, dumbass. It ain’t made of plastic.” Breda snorts. 

It all sounds beyond disastrous, like his very existence should be tantamount to a miracle. The air hasn’t gotten any lighter. He punches the AC button again, just in case he didn’t get it right the first time. 

“Have you seen those burn marks though?”

He adjusts the small air-grids on the panel below the radio and lets his hand hover over them in tense anticipation. 

“A friend of mine said they had gym class together and that it looks pretty gnarly. I know you’re not supposed to ask, but, like, I wonder if it really happened like they say.”

Cruising through the blazing concrete, he starts to feel his balance tip. This was an okay day, for the most part. Okay-enough, that is. Perhaps he can blame it on the weather (again) if by the time he gets home, the hiss of exhaustion eating at his brain and that familiar filter of dulled irritation have finished settling in.

It isn’t always like this, but when it is, there isn’t any remembering what normalcy feels like. What friendly banter even means, what laughter does to his stomach. It’s like he’s thrown into an ether, only vexation gets through. 

“Who the fuck came up with that Oliver Twist story, anyway,” Breda huffs while rummaging through his bag. _Who the fuck indeed_ , Roy would like to answer, but it’s suddenly a task that seems like too much of a drag for such a petty conversation.

The volume around him is starting to feel incredibly close. His guts tense up with the thought of Edward — again. Red, black, yellow. A cluster of mysterious scars. The way his chair lightly creaks as he periodically shifts his weight — 

Havoc shrugs. “I heard it from Fuery ‘cause he was in the robotics team last semester, and there was this guy who went with him and sat next to this other girl ‘cause they had Mr. Hughes in their homeroom, and she used to date that chick who always dresses in camouflage, y’know the one? She has a weird name, and she’s best friends with that other blondie who’s always hanging with him—”

“Can we change the subject, please.” Roy says. If he had the energy, he’d wince at his own tone.

His tongue feels dry and he’s tired of grinding it against his teeth for moisture. He’s tired of waging battle against the car’s air conditioning system. Havoc puts both hands in the air and keeps puffing away while Breda finds the half-finished Twix bar he’d been searching for and finishes it off in one bite. 

He thinks of Edward’s chair. Second row, all the way to the left. He never looks out the window, but it’s as if the window looks in on him, a wary side-eye disguised as sunlight. His clothes look heavy, he cards his fingers through his hair to push it out of his eyes but the same few strands keep obstinately falling back, his left-hand writing can’t adjust to the way the desk is set up — for righties only — so his elbow bumps against the wall sometimes, only sometimes, when he scribbles fast and forceful, like his pen is going to pierce through the paper. Roy wants to snap, to tell him to be quiet. 

Roy wants to tell him to _shut up_ , even if he hasn’t said anything, even if he hasn’t emitted a single sound outside of the deafening gravity with which he moves, with which his right knee repeatedly jerks up and down. 

He wants to, to have him turn his head, to look at him again, to see the face of someone who keeps all _that_ , zippered up underneath the layered clothing. Like a dragon hoarding it’s gold. Like a grave of secrets. To see if he can decipher the expression on his eyes, to wordlessly ask, “ _Is it true? Can a single person contain so much ill-fortune without imploding?_ ”. 

He shouldn’t think like this, he’s never been one to admit to being interested in such morbid gossip. Once the thought sneaks it’s way in, though, there’s no showing it where the door’s at. 

*

It turns out he hates the entire week. Dragging himself out of bed feels like his head might roll off his shoulders.

His Prozac looks at him with unamused silence, as if reminding him that it’s been keeping its end of the bargain. 

He’s done it since he was a kid; two pills with a room-temperature glass of water or a sip of that 1% milk Aunt Chris only uses for preparing White Russians, but it somehow feels like he’s been doing it wrong now, for days. 

Like he suddenly grew an alternate throat that sends all the medication straight to a secret garbage disposal that’s lodged somewhere in his chest instead of its actual supposed destination, towards making his neurotransmitters work at gunpoint.

Like someone’s playing a huge prank on him that involves replacing his intake with sugar pills. He hopes they’re having a laugh at watching him drag his feet through the motions of his everyday life. Every day crawls and lingers with it’s own freestyle interpretation of exhausted chagrin, the million shades of ‘tedious’. 

It’s as if he’s walking on a hamster wheel, only it’s the world’s biggest eye-roll and he keeps pedaling it without actually moving. 

When Riza drops her navy-blue binder onto the surface next to him during lunchtime and kindly reminds him that she isn’t failing their history project because of his negligence for the minor details, he can’t even come up with the energy needed to muster up a half-hearted groan. 

“One of those days?” she asks him.

“Weeks,” he says, while inspecting the prominence of a rich, bright, crimson red over the lesser shades of yellow on the apple in his hands. 

“Hm.” She makes a face. He can’t see her, as she’s standing just behind his line of sight, but the inflection of her tone suggests she’s definitely doing something amongst the lines of pursed lips. 

“Any leads?” she asks — it’s their not-so-cryptic code for inquiring about what may have triggered this specific episode. 

Sometimes it’s clear enough; it’s a marathon of nightmares, a reminder of Lila Mustang in the form of an odd text sent from a strange number, the spark of bench-top fires in lab; the way the air bends and crackles around the small combustion.

This time around, though, he has no fucking clue. He closes his eyes, puts both palms up in the air and takes a deep, mournful sigh because he’s still a frustrated theatre kid at his core. 

“Where in the world is my fucking serotonin?” He turns his gaze upwards, as if imploring with an anonymous deity. He might actually want to put a missing persons ad in the papers if this goes on for longer than a month. 

“Well, it isn’t here,” Riza points at the binder containing all the comprised lectures they have to go through before next week. “But if you finish up soon enough, I’m sure it’ll give you time to look.” 

Roy drops his hands and lightly snorts, but takes the binder anyway, because he is still not at the stage where he’s got a death wish. He doesn’t expect her to tap his shoulder before walking away from the table, but appreciates that it happens. 

*

It doesn’t take long for the cafeteria’s atmosphere to become an insufferable cacophony of inexplicable teenage spirit. The unbearable heat of an overcrowded place. The noise bubbles up and bounces against the roof. He remembers a time when he was a part of it — the inoffensive plastic-spoon-slingshot, scattering over-boiled peas all over the grimy tables, not minding the anonymous lovers’ initials carved into the surface with house keys — two weeks ago. 

When he gets tired of poking the little milk carton’s mouth open and shut, shut and open, fold and unfolded, he gets up and throws a half-muttered excuse about going to the bathroom over his shoulder. He hopes someone catches it. 

He means to look over at the fire-exit doors that lead to the east-area gardens and fantasize about pushing them open and walking straight to his car to take a nap, a few feeble trees tousle through a light, lazy breeze. It’s tempting, but his eyes eventually also land on the table closest to it.

It’s one of those high-tier splashy kids from a grade under him that he’s also heard wild things about, he thinks his name is Ling. His plush yellow cardigan isn’t more attention-grabbing than the boy he’s drilling his words into, though — the boy who’s looking past him and at nothing in particular, seemingly both vacant and stressed out at the same time. A look he seems to sport around as a default. Ling taps his shoulder and shakes him around enthusiastically, Edward lets him.

Roy doesn’t look any longer than he has to. He enters the bathroom and bends over into the sink to stick his head under the faucet. At first impact, cold water makes him feel like someone else. Like someone who might make it out of this one, just like his past selves have managed to do before. 

He looks in the mirror. He makes himself tired. He might not make it home. Looking down at the cracked porcelain sink, he realizes it might be one of those days in which his wheels insist on pulling his car over the road’s edge. 

His internal Riza Hawkeye tells him to be quiet and just find some trivia to play on his phone, to let himself be lulled into passiveness by the swirling voices inside the resonance box known as a classroom, to let the noise fly over him like lazy moths if it’s otherwise too unbearable. To count the tiles on the roof, to see where the windows need some cleaning, to simply exist until the bell releases him back home. To try and remember all the reasons why he actually enjoys English Literature, to remember Carol Ann Duffy, Lord Byron, Les Murray. To recite their poems to himself. To breathe. 

He thinks of her chocolate eyes, the way her boots always leave a trail of mud on the school halls. He thinks of the time he was innocently looking at the small .357 Magnum Chris had under the counter. Simply looking. Admiring the way the light caught on the edges of polished silver, thinking of how nicely it weighed in his hands, thinking of how good the cool material would feel on the skin of his face, when the bell on the door jingled. The goddamned bell. 

He immediately threw the gun back in it’s compartment as if he’d been burned while a battered-looking old man came in with a blonde, short-haired girl in overalls and a shabby beige bomber jacket. He sat on a stool in the bar in front of him and took a handful of peanuts from one of the little glass plates used for trail mix before sliding it over to the girl, telling her to eat up. Valerie came up from behind him and served the man a whisky on the rocks, before placing her hands on his shoulders and telling him to show the girl some pinball. He did. 

He remembers. He smiles. He takes a deep breath and takes himself out of the bathroom. And the force through which he pushes the door open is meant to feel vindicating.

But his intentions are met with some resistance. Said resistance cracks open and starts bleeding on the ground in a matter of seconds, and Roy sees a flash of yellow. Yellow, red, black. More red. He awakens with his heart climbing up his throat. 

Edward is quick to start wiping his face down with his sleeve while sitting on the floor, and when Roy steps around him, he doesn’t look up from his shoes. 

When Roy hauls him up, he calculates a hundred and ten pounds at most, and yet his body feels like it’s trying to make itself dead weight, like it wants to be left glued to the ground, like it’s soul calls for it with longing. When they stand closer that they’ve ever been, he thinks of the mysterious glove on the hand he’s holding; he sees a couple of scattered sun freckles under his eyes; he sees eyes of a full, molten amber with a myriad of different streaks of honey, butterscotch, daffodil, tuscan sun. Blood, blood, blood.

A strand of hair caked in red and plastered to his lip. He looks at his mouth with an attention he hopes is fleeting and unnoticeable. How they glisten in red-tainted saliva. He hopes, with a fervor quite unlike anything he’s ever felt before, that he didn’t break anything that wasn’t already like that when he found him. 

Edward goes on as if sleepwalking. He breathes and talks in a soft, tired tenor through the whole ordeal like Roy merely flicked him in the face, and it makes him shudder. He feels the barrier between them, his touch is met with the type of reticence of someone who’s expecting the unexpected. Another blow, maybe. For his helping hands to turn into fists. 

Edward shakes his head and says “I’ve had worse” like that’s supposed to mean anything. Thick blood trickles down his chin and a few drops land on the toe of his dirty left combat boot. He doesn’t seem to notice. He only uses his left hand to try and wipe his face clean, there’s red smudged into his cuticles as he seemingly attempts to jam all the blood back in. 

Crimson red keeps cascading out, Roy hears him swallow the accumulated fluid in his mouth, as if ashamed of his own clot. 

There seems to be a lot to unpack here, but Roy’s hands clench at his sides and he surrenders. It’s better than trying to hug him. He doesn’t want to know what that shoe’s sole feels like on his shin, and this guy sure does look like he’s a few seconds away from snapping. Probably just to cave in on himself, his entire body vibrates with nervous energy, like he's got an itch he can't reach with his hands. 

So he walks away, with that ever-so clichèd image of a fallen angel, except this one didn’t fall — rather it was pushed. The clouds pulled from underneath it. It plummeted into a concrete-filled earth and cracked the pavement. Pulled by a gravity so strong it might pierce straight through the earth any second. It’s eyes glimmered with a daunting sense of accumulated knowledge, foreboding with all the secrets it may never spill, and when reckoning came, it walked through the havoc with desolate resolve.

He hears Aunt Chris’ voice, “ _You’re gonna burst one day if you don’t sit down and write a damn play already._ ” 

*

Once the skies start clearing, he is once again met with the heavy crown of his social responsibilities. The knowledge that he now must answer to the winks and waves he gets while doing laps on the field, that he’s required by the etiquette known as ‘being the depository for every preppy girl’s fantasy about a multiracial athlete with a vast and snazzy vocabulary at his disposal’ to take two fingers to his forehead and salute while smirking towards the distance. People don’t think it, but it’s hard work. He runs stylishly and with little haste, he lets himself look around at all the boys and girls who catch his eye, he makes truce with the sunlight draping over him and lets it emphasize his gleaming traits — as per the treaty of Hot Girl Summer, which in his case would be more the Neurodivergent Boy Winter Solstice, seeing as they are nearing October. 

Upholding a reputation like his probably burns more calories, merely through the effort invested into maintaining that ever-so-delicate balance between aloofness and poise, than what his football career ever has. But it’s work that needs to be done, nonetheless. 

That’s also the reason why he buried the Marx/Engels Collected Works Volume I, 1975 Original Edition Ritzy Bitzy Book Falman gave him at the end of History as deep as his bag would go. Or more like the one he sort of forcefully took from him, in a manner he still hopes was innocuous enough. 

Vato said he’d been saving it for him. 

“ _You speak to each other?_ ” Roy had asked, not entirely sure of what tone he was going for, but hoping it didn’t sound anything even remotely close to jealousy, because what the fuck. 

Vato nodded. “I know for a fact we’ll never study in-depth communist theory within our current school curriculum, but I do have two copies of this book, and the rest of the volumes I could lend him in the future…, I thought if anyone might appreciate it, it’s Ed.” 

“ _Ed?_ ” He rolled the abbreviation around his mouth and found that he kind of liked the feel of it, but regretted repeating the name out loud. He’s got a strange presence even when only evoked. Ed. Damaged skin, smudged blood, a hundred barriers. Eyes like a cat’s that could swallow up a black hole. 

Ed. 

“I can pass it on to him, we’ve got chemistry together.” He still doesn’t know what took over him, but the words formulated and spilled out of his mouth without any prior warning, like he was but a vessel for some sort of divine message. 

If Vato wanted to further inquire into his motivations, he didn’t get a chance to so much as briefly squint at him before Roy was coaxing the damned thing out of his hands and making up some bullshit excuse to be gone in a dash. 

He makes his way back home that day thinking that now might be as good a time as any to admit he’s probably got something of a fixation. 

Roy just wants to go and see. It may be a fascination of a macabre type. 

That..., May not be entirely okay. 

“Why do I even bother,” Aunt Chris deadpans at him as he walks in through the bar with the open book in his hands, a few pages of Friedrich Engels’ 1845 text already underway. He distantly acknowledges her and assumes she’s speaking of the age-old reprimand against walking without looking ahead. Don’t run with scissors, don’t walk yourself into a ditch over being too absorbed by the ‘ _The Condition of the Working Class in England_ ’. 

“We try so hard to keep you happy, and this is what you decide to get into.” She motions towards the volume in his hands. 

“You should have warned me that our current economic system is so cruel and dishonorable, I wouldn’t have gotten my hopes up,” he answers while adjusting the backpack strap on his shoulder and sliding his middle finger into the page to not lose it. He closes the hard-back cover over his digit while walking towards the stairs that lead to the two-story home atop the present establishment. 

“Oh boy,” she rasps through a clipped chuckle. “It was bad enough I never let you believe in Santa.”

Something Roy always thought to be ironic enough for a woman whose bar name had the word “Christmas” in it, to which she’d answered something about, “ _Catering to our nostalgia-starved culture._ ”

A practical woman through and through. 

Roy hums in confirmation while making his way upstairs before Chris’s tutting pulls him back into the room, where she’s idly running a towel over the bar’s countertop. 

“I _did_ teach you some manners, though,” She says. 

He makes his way back towards her and bends over the bar to where she’s exposed her right cheek to him. He smacks the routinely greeting-kiss on her deceivingly soft skin and becomes aware of the familiar scent of rosemary and menthol cigarettes. It’s the same one she’s had since the first day they met, when he was 10 years old and she was salvation incarnate, a sturdy woman in a lengthy fur coat with electric blue nail-polish and a daring smirk, crouching down to the waiting-room chairs where he sat to place her fingers under his chin. 

“ _Care to accompany this fine lady home?_ ” she’d asked, offering her bent elbow. He understood why his mother had never mentioned he had other relatives, like he understood why she’d left him. 

It still hadn’t been easy to breathe during the weeks he'd spent at that place. At times, it’d been near impossible. On those days, everything was hard to hold on to. That is, until Aunt Chris made her shining entrance and he released a sigh he didn’t know he’d been holding while latching on to her arm. 

“I’ll expect you down here at six,” She tells him while taking the empty glass in front of the mid-day drinker next to him for a refill. 

“Yes ma'am.” 

*

 _“… The spontaneous, instinctive movements of these vast masses of working people, over a vast extent of country, the simultaneous outburst of their common discontent with a miserable social condition…_ “ Roy brings the pencil down again, a habit born out of a child therapist’s mechanism for ‘maximum content absorbance in kids with attention deficit’, with which it then turned out he was misdiagnosed. Nevertheless, the underlining stuck. 

“ _… the same everywhere and due to the same causes, made them conscious of the fact, that they formed a new and distinct class of American society; a class of – practically speaking – more or less hereditary wage-workers, proletarians._ ” He circles the last word. 

He shouldn’t be doing this. 

Although he’s only a man. And Edward is only someone who was absent for two days straight this week — might anyone blame him for wanting to snoop around the book’s contents while it waits for it’s rightful owner to make an appearance? 

It turns out he knew little to nothing about what he’d had the intention to preach at class. He had but a fleeting, rough idea about what social injustice ought to elicit in someone like him, but hadn’t had the words with which to construct actual discourse. 

He does now. 

Along with the knowledge of Edward’s own convictions, and, well. The more he reads, the more it becomes clear his classmate and bathroom-encounter-victim somehow knew what he was talking about, and his passion for the defense of coal-miners isn’t just his, now. Furthermore, this puts them on the same boat, ideologically speaking. 

Roy will be damned. 

“ _… American public opinion was almost unanimous on this one point; that there was no working class, in the European sense of the word, in America; that consequently no class struggle between workmen and capitalists, such as tore European society to pieces, was possible in the American Republic; and that, therefore, Socialism was a thing of foreign importation which could never take root on American soil…_ ”

 _And yet_ , he thinks to himself as he absentmindedly taps the pencil’s eraser on his chin while holding the book open over his face. 

He’s convinced Kimblee would be swiftly out-classed by a lecture of this magnitude, and the thought fills him with too much glee. The more he reads, the more his teacher’s humiliation tactics pale as the petty little ad-hominem strategies that they are — if he didn’t know that already. The more he lets himself feel some sort of rage to fill the silent spaces Edward left — subdued by Kimblee’s brutal degradation of him and his track-record, scared into compliance, forced to feel ashamed of the unforgivable crime of not having a family, a wholesome three-story townhouse with a golden retriever on its porch. 

He looks towards the clock on his desk, 2:34 am. He’s never felt more awake — and not in an exclusively metaphorical sense. 

He distantly wonders what could’ve kept Edward from showing up to school on the past days, seeing as he’s never been so much as late to any of the classes they share. Mrs. Curtis had looked over at where he usually sat during chemistry with poorly veiled apprehension. He hopes — _hopes_ — he shows up tomorrow. He hopes she shows up tomorrow without his nose in a cast. Roy winces at the reminder but is also filled with purpose at the thought.

Passing this wisdom on has never felt more important, he’ll walk in with this here volume of precious knowledge tucked under his arm instead of shamefully concealed by the depths of his backpack. 

He’ll deliver it to where it can do the most damage. Roy grins. 

“ _… And with true American instinct, this consciousness led them at once to take the next step towards their deliverance: the formation of a political working-men’s party …_ ” The sound of pencil graphite on paper fills the room. 

“ _… In May the struggle for the Eight Hours’ working-day, the troubles in Chicago, Milwaukee, etc., the attempts of the ruling class to crush the nascent uprising of Labor by brute force and brutal class-justice; in November the new Labor Party organized in all great centres …. May and November have hitherto reminded the American bourgeoisie only of the payment of coupons of U.S. bonds; henceforth May and November will remind them, too, of the dates on which the American working-class presented_ their _coupons for payment…_ ”

At that, Roy laughs out loud. 

*

A pink shirt. A white hoodie. 

He’d be lying if he said he didn’t notice. 

The bells of doomsday rang as he jumped out of his car, with so much haste, Havoc came up behind him and handed him the keys he’d left jammed in the ignition with an expression of mild concern.

“Y’know, if you wanted to gift me your ride, you could be more ceremonial about it.” 

He pays no mind. His actual mind goes blank the moment he sees him and realizes it’s not someone else. He’s at his locker, it’s door ajar and concealing his face, but it’s him. He isn’t wearing the trademark colors, the trademark wall of spiked warnings. His hair is loose, Roy thinks he feels something in his chest choke on itself — he might need to see a doctor about that. 

He takes a deep breath and decides he is resolutely _not_ going to trip over the locker door and trap his fingers on the door. People start falling out of place to get to class, like bees bumping into each other and away from the halls, he walks in the opposite direction from everyone else’s flow and is glad Edward doesn’t move from his rummaging. 

He arrives at his side, everything about this is so typical. 

Just as he’s about to clear his throat, Edward’s covered hand appears around the edges of the aluminum door and he moves to close it, his face is revealed behind the locker’s pale blue and Roy’s breath catches — in a bad way. 

There he stands, looking at him with mild shock. Both his eyes cradled by the darkened dermis of cloudy bruising. With enough distance, it just looks like he hasn’t slept since 1801, but Roy acknowledges their last encounter had to have left a mark. It looks like the rebound resulting from practically having his nose jammed back into his skull, but it’s not too bad, it’s not too deep. It looks as if it’s been brushed in his skin, like a breezy afterthought, even though it shouldn’t be there. He has to suppress a wince. 

There’s a white pill in his lips, held between his teeth.

“Hey,” Roy starts, proud of how unaffected he comes through. 

Edward briefly looks around him before moving to take the pill in between his fingers so he can speak, 

“Um, h-hey,” he answers. Roy takes him in as he is today, wearing light, pastel colors. It makes the injury on his face look that much more tender. It makes his whole presence feel softer somehow, oversensitive. A lot more yielding. Supple. It contrasts to his skin’s damage in a way Roy perceived as strangely flattering. 

That probably isn’t a nice thought to have, but there it is. 

There’s something else in his eyes, though. They’re red-rimmed, but not in a way that indicates he’s been crying. His skin is slightly flushed — it might just be the frigid morning air. 

He’s just glad he wrote the little note that’s stashed between the cover and first page of the book in his hands, although he’s not quite sure what compelled him to do it. 

“So, Falman said you’d be into this,” he says, offering it to him. Edward looks down at the title, his right hand still on the combination knob. He then looks back up at Roy, before carding his gaze through his face, as if searching for the gist of it all. 

He looks behind himself, towards the opposite side of the hall, like searching for the invisible person he thinks Roy might be talking to, instead of him. The gesture makes his chest contract in an unsettling manner. 

“I — um, yeah. Thanks — thank you,” he finally says, albeit a tad frantic, voice low and a little rough, as he takes the book in his right hand. “Woah,” he adds as Roy lets it’s entire weight go. It is heavy.

“Yeah, be careful, it’s got about thirty years worth of angry essays compiled.” He informs him. 

Edward looks up again from where his eyes had been, widening at the sight of a very-much untouched and indeed very expensive-looking collection. 

“Is this… Is it the original edition?” he gawks worriedly. Roy nods, to which he reacts with even more appallment.

“Printed in Sussex and all.” He adds. 

“You’ve… You’ve read it?” 

Roy shrugs. He won’t lie just to get along.

“Only a few chapters — I hope you don’t mind,” he adds while watching as Edward opens the cover. He dry-swallowed the pill held between his left thumb and index so swiftly Roy almost didn’t notice it’s gone until he sees his free fingers page through the book. Some trepidation overtakes him when he thinks he might prematurely read the note, the one he wrote last night. The one he wrote in accordance to being civil and a master plan-executioner.

He’s calmed down by the fact that Edward skips a few chapters. 

His scribbling appears on the edge of one of the pages and he absentmindedly licks his lips in tame disquiet when Edward stops there. His fingers ghost over the light calligraphy. There’s a very slight tremble to them, one even he might’ve overlooked, were he not paying sharp attention. 

But he is. 

“You write on books?” he asks, tone unreadable. 

“I did it on pencil so it’s easily erasable. I’m sorry, it’s an old habit.” He answers nonchalantly. In his experience, it’s always better to apologize beforehand, people react a lot tamer to that.

Except when Edward looks up, there’s not a single trace of annoyance on his face. 

“It’s cool,” he says, it passes through him like a breezy whisper, and his expression suggests he’s quickly embarrassed of having said it. He looks back down. Roy swallows.

Edward silently stares at his writing for a few second more, and he doesn’t know what to make of the moment, until he says,

“And you do cursive.” It’s an innocuous enough remark, but Roy feels himself get defensive for some reason.

He straightens from where he was, leaning against the adjacent locker. 

“Yeah, I do.” It maybe comes out a bit forceful. Edward is biting his lips but not in a suggestive way — he’s ripping some skin off with his teeth.

He looks up again.

Eyes like a cat’s. Yellow, purple, red, pink. His hair is nice like this, and noticing that isn’t necessarily a sign of attraction. It’s an objective truth. 

“Me, too,” he says. There’s a pause.

Roy can only hum in response, because he never thought to imagine what Edward’s letters might be like. What the test papers he turns in on record time might contain, aesthetically speaking. Now that he knows, though, it’s like he’s pinned on something valuable. Like he’s realized something quite important. Something that’d been a long time coming. 

They’re immediately hollered at by one of the hall’s frightful keepers, nagging about their passes, about their class tardiness. Edward tucks the book under his arm and closes his locker, they go their separate ways, but not before Roy’s obligated, “ _See you around._ ” Although nothing about the way he says it feels perfunctory. 

Edward smiles at him. Slight and unsure. 

He walks to class suppressing the urge to look back. 

Cursive.

Makes sense.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> talk to me


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Howdy; so who's here to read a long-ass chapter on Edward Elric's hs au brand of pain and suffering. Warnings: there's another scene near the end where domestic physical abuse takes place (stop reading after the fifth asterisk if that doesn't really do it for you) and extensive mentions of opioid consumption.

He comes back to the land of the living — yet again and surprisingly so — an undetermined amount of time later to the painful rumbling in his chest, then the sound of cautious shuffling behind him. He goes rock still.  
  
The kitchen floor is still as hard and cold as ever, like it’s irritated it has to deal with his trembling weight, the lights are still off. It feels real this time.  
  
Some lonely strands of moonlight slide in through the window over a perpetually leaking sink.  
  
 _Drip,_  
  
 _Drip,_  
  
 _Drip._  
  
He’s been here before, but can’t really be bothered to try and remember when, or why, or how.  
  
The only thing certain is whatever shit deity supposedly has a say on what goes down in his life still has eternal room for improvement in terms of coming up with new ways to torture him. It’s something like fate; or something like the entire circumstance of the world; or something like himself, getting in his own way and letting the vegetable basket he was carrying drop to the ground without contrition.  
  
Tomatoes scatter everywhere and roll away towards impossible corners, below furniture; under the tight cupboards; out towards the edge of the world.  
  
He can’t move to go pick them up. He can’t cry about it either. He’s just laying there, stuck, watching shit fall out of place.  
  
Cauliflower, lettuce, carrots, more tomatoes.  
  
He thinks he’d heard her say something about it before — something about preparing their favorite pasta sauce for dinner. Her soft hands entrusting his with some spare change and a list of groceries.  
  
He thinks he’d been happy about it. Beyond delighted. Overjoyed. He thinks he skipped all the way back home, up the hill, like an idiot.  
  
He feels the unmistakable heat of a nearby body and weakly curls further into himself. He doesn’t know for sure if he passed out at any point — his lungs still feel like they’re imploding and the stench hasn’t left his nostrils, both sensations that feel like they’ve been present in a continued loop since the beginning of time.  
  
He needs to move, he knows that. But knowing and doing are two very separate realms of possibility at the moment. He can only cough. And smell the pain. The scent of raw tomatoes falling to the ground. He’s alone.  
  
She isn’t making dinner tonight, it’s his fault.  
  
Again.  
  
Two hands touch his back, a low whine escapes his lips as he tries to move away, he’s at the point where he would beg. It’s a good thing he has his words already practiced.  
  
The hands circle his shoulders and suddenly Winry’s hushed voice fills the air.  
  
“It’s me, Ed. It’s morning, c’mon,” she coaxes.  
  
He wakes with a start.  
  
He tries breathing through his nose but it’s still a no-go. A coughing fit hijacks his body as his surroundings materialize. The Rockbell house, right. The clock. The dog. The smell of oil.  
  
A cup of tea flies onto the little table beside the couch.  
  
“Drink up, then you can go take a shower and change. Dr. Marcoh will see us in an hour,” Pinako informs him while lighting a match. Ed stares at the way the little flame is sucked into the pipe’s wooden bowl by her sharp inwards breaths.  
  
Like 70 years old and still, both his lungs couldn’t take him as far as a quarter of hers could.  
  
He sluggishly nods.  
  
*  
  
The waiting room is a small, unsuspecting reception that looks more like a bohemian home’s living room.  
  
There’s a vast variety of indoor plants in hanging clay pots all around and the secretary wears a knitted Coogi sweater, her name tag pinned on top of it. It’s got so many colors he feels intruded upon by the sensorial input.  
  
She’s got a small radio beside her that’s concealed by the countertop and gently playing Little Lies through some static interference. It’s a song he’s heard before. It’s a song by… Fleetwood…, something — he only sort of recognizes it thanks to Winry’s own musical education. Dear god. The woman hums to it.  
  
It’s… It’s weird. But comfortable enough. His mind’s not awake enough to start making daily things feel ominous, that’s one thing he’s got going for him at the moment.  
  
He’d been brooding the entire car ride with the expectation of an aseptic, squeaky white compression box with recycled air and pneumonia-riddled kids playing with some beat up, bacteria-riddled Legos on a little table in the middle while their parents bit their nails and paged through Cosmopolitan magazines. He’d expected shit to be dire — so this is definitely an upgrade. A bit kooky and a little new-age, but he’ll take whatever small kindnesses life is willing to hand out. The blessing of a new day.  
  
Winry’s sitting next to him, he looks down at his lap to realize she hasn’t let go of his right hand since they came in. This reminds him that despite appearances, they still are at a doctor's office, the place where Bad Shit happens. The limit to the known world, the shattering of every little fabricated safety you’ve accumulated like a token of sublimated, fleeting pleasure. At the end, there’s only a reception and a decaying body, faced with its own withering anxiety and discomfort. Nowhere to run.  
  
The place where you get a nervous kind of appetite, suddenly you’re famished even if you know you’d throw it up. You get a pang of hunger and you imagine sunny-side-up eggs with maple syrup, bacon, hash browns, stir fry, chicken sandwiches, anything you can put sriracha sauce on. You imagine vitality.  
  
You immediately see what it’d look like as vomit, splashed on the floor between your shoes.  
  
In a doctor’s office, you pretend you know what you’re doing.  
  
“Thanks again for the change in clothes,” he says to her, if only to break the musicalized silence. Winry’s sitting with unusual rigidness, looking straight ahead and only turning her gaze at him to offer a smile that only sort of reaches her eyes. It’s difficult to tell, with her.  
  
“Don’t worry about it — sorry I couldn’t find you anything black, but you actually look good in lighter colors.” She grins. “You should go for it more often.”  
  
Ed shrugs to hide the way his stomach flips at the comment — he’ll just put that inside a little drawer in the back of his mind, for later inspection and all.  
  
He’s just glad he doesn’t stink of fucking Raid anymore, even if it means he’ll have to tell it from the start now, instead of letting this Dr. Marcoh guy infer it on his own.  
  
“Mr. Elric?” the Coogi woman chirps. Ed shudders at the formality. Eugh. “He’s ready for you.” She smiles. Winry and Pinako are way ahead of him in terms of processing and they both stand before he can even think of shifting his weight forward.  
  
Winry lightly pulls his hand upwards and as a buzzing flash of pain suddenly punctures a tendon in his shoulder, he jerkily stands so that the angle of her lifting his arm doesn’t fuck him up, but he doesn’t have to let go of her, either.  
  
Who says you can’t have it all?  
  
They walk towards a door in the opposite side of the room, it lets a young woman out and she politely smiles at them. There’s lipstick on her teeth.  
  
“Pleasure to see you, as always,” the man says.  
  
“Thank you, doc. I’ll keep in touch,” she answers and walks past, shoes clicking away into the distance as the doctor turns his civil smile at them and Ed feels himself wanting to shrink and disappear into the ether. To become a blip in the air.  
  
His smile widens,  
  
“Winry! It’s been a while, you’re tall as a tree,” he muses. His voice is low and steady, a little hoarse towards the edges.  
  
Winry chuckles, “Hi Marcoh.”  
  
“Thank you for seeing us on such short notice,” Pinako says as she extends her hand to shake his.  
  
“Of course, it’s no problem at all. Is this the young man?” When his eyes land on him, panic makes itself known. He answers with a tight-lipped smile.  
  
“Hi.” Ah, yes, indeed. The young fuckup who got fumigated, he refrains from adding.  
  
They’ve made their way into his office. He looks around at the same pleasant laid-back atmosphere of the room outside before the door clicks shut and he has to suppress a flinch, only he cuts it halfway so it ends up looking like he was about to trip over himself. Magnificent save. His physical unease becomes that much more acute once they’re in, once this is being made official. He doesn’t let himself be fooled by this consulting room’s homey vibe, even if the warm temperature would have him do otherwise.  
  
Winry lightly squeezes his palm with hers.  
  
It’s simple enough decor; there’s a rich chocolate wooden desk and various framed paintings. Framed degrees, too. Papery things to prove one didn’t just walk into a clandestine hellhole and assure the public that they’re not getting a homeopathic treatment for something like kidney failure. Although judging by the looks of it, he wouldn’t put it past the place to be inclined towards, er, some naturalist remedies.   
  
There’s a large painting on the wall adjacent to the desk, it catches his eye as Marcoh and Granny’s small-talk fills the air. Dr. Marcoh asks about the drive, the auto repair business, the bi-monthly memorial gatherings that he, unfortunately, hasn’t had the time to attend as of late. Ed inches forward and Winry follows close behind. He stops in front of a darkened picture.  
  
It’s an old man in a somber room, like, sepulchral, where the pillars build up high over his head and an arched crystal window shows a clear night’s sky. Ominous moonlight. The man is down on one knee, his face entranced with fascination at something — a light, it comes from a sort of test tube set up in a wooden stool. Two boys — he guesses some types of apprentices — stare at him from behind in curious trepidation. There’s a myriad of different objects dimly lit by weak candlelight. It’s got nothing on the one coming from the luminous bulb in the center…  
  
“You like that?” Marcoh’s voice suddenly snaps him out of the appreciation. “It’s 'The Alchemist Discovering Phosphorus', by English painter Joseph Wright, did you know him?”  
  
Ed looks back at him. He shakes his head. He admittedly hasn’t heard of a lot of things that, to most people, might qualify as general culture. Until very recently, he didn’t know what people meant when they talked about a candy called Ring Pop. He didn’t get the Bob Ross references. He doesn’t get on the remembrance train when someone has mentioned that one ‘Art Attack’ host who died of a heroin overdose.  
  
He grew up in a rural town in the middle of ass-fuck nowhere, and then in a ratty clinic with donated toys to play with — like that patched up chicken plushie a hospital volunteer once handed him, and he said he didn’t need ‘cause he wasn’t a little kid anymore, but ended up hugging to his chest and whispering small-talk to on the longer nights, so as to not go completely insane at the tender age of ten-and-a-half — and then staring at grimy walls or trying to finish chewed-up jigsaw puzzles in the middle of a rec-room that didn’t have any cable tv.  
  
He didn’t know some cereal boxes come with prizes inside. His bad.  
  
He only wishes that this whole being an unsophisticated, uncultured swine deal was less embarrassing.  
  
“Well, it’s quite the sight. Although the original must be something else entirely.” Marcoh smiles at him, easygoing. Genuine-looking.  
  
The original. It’s probably in a place like England, then. The closest he’ll ever get to that is the Fish & Chips restaurant next to the laundromat he goes to.  
  
He’s got it systemized, though. And it’s all laid out in front of him, one step at a time. The only place he’s ever going to is graduation, then to Alphonse, then straight to an uninterrupted 10-year sleep once Al gets into Johns-Hopkins, on a fast track to success and everything he’s ever dreamed of.  
  
It’s a great plan, if you ask him. Fail-proof, because Alphonse is a fucking genius. He’ll just need help with some application fees and then his full-ride will surely kick in. Schools will murder each other over him. Ed smirks at the prospect.  
  
Dr. Marcoh takes a breath and moves towards his chair. “Please, take a seat.” He extends a charitable hand towards the ones in front. Ed swallows and it sticks. There’s two chairs, one of which is taken by Pinako. He hesitates about sitting down in case Winry wants to rest her legs, but she nudges him down with her palms on his shoulders. She leaves them there.  
  
He doesn’t want to have the conversation that ensues. The motions — this whole doctor-patient-theatre-piece in which he’s robbed of all his lines, left on the spotlight to scramble around for answers. Improvising.  
  
He doesn’t want this man’s pity. His judgment. His incisions on his miserable skin. Ed holds his breath.  
  
“So,” he begins, leaning forward on his elbows with intertwined fingers. The lines on his eyes are softened by the light and Ed assumes this is what people mean when they describe someone as the ‘grandad type’. “Pinako here informed me that there was an incident involving insecticide spray, is that correct?”  
  
Ed nods. He silently begs for the impossible — to prevent the conversation about the how’s and the why’s, to get a checkup and a prescription and a nice farewell. To be patched up and given a lollipop and kicked to the curb. To get on with his life.  
  
Filled to the brim with legally-acquired pharmaceuticals, that’d be divine.  
  
“Well the first thing we ought to look out for is signs of poisoning, the chemicals in that type of substance are no joke — Pinako said you threw up?” Another nod. “How many times?”  
  
Ed pauses. He catches himself wanting to turn his head left, to where Granny’s sitting. To get some eye contact — permission, agreement, consensus. He quickly smothers the impulse and takes a ragged breath that miraculously doesn’t turn into one of those phlegmy coughs.  
  
“Uh, I dunno. I think…, Three?” he says.  
  
Winry hums in affirmation above him, her hands ever so present on his shoulders — the needle starts prodding in, his arm is fucking pissed today. It shouldn’t be a surprise given how Evie went at him, but he was too absorbed by puking up his lungs to notice before.  
  
He wants to turn around and wrap his hands around her waist. He feels like a child who wishes with every fiber in his being to exist only within the skirts of his mom’s eternally expansive dress. Enveloped in warm darkness.  
  
Fuck.  
  
Dr. Marcoh nods very slightly, almost like it’s an afterthought of a motion.  
  
“How about now? Are you feeling any nausea still?”  
  
Ed licks his lips. He hums. “Yeah. A bit.” An understatement.  
  
The man nods again.  
  
“How about the following symptoms,” he starts while leaning slightly back, as if to get a broader view of him. “Any dizziness?” Ed shakes his head. “Sudden palpitations?” Just the ones from running for my life for five or so blocks. He shakes his head again. “Breathing difficulties?” At that, he hesitates.  
  
He doesn’t think it’d be wise to perceive the pressure on his chest as resulting from an abnormally long panic attack — even though it wouldn’t be the strangest thing to happen to him. It’s most likely what the doctor here thinks it to be.  
  
“Yeah.” He nods. Winry’s thumb is drawing idle circles on his shoulder plate; it doesn’t have any pressure to it, but the pain is starting to spread on its own.  
  
“Alright.” Dr. Marcoh drawls, “Seizures, loss of consciousness, uncontrollable agitation?”  
  
“No.” He answers decidedly, though when Winry takes a breath to speak he doubts it all.  
  
“Actually, that last one, doctor,” she starts, resolute. “It took you a while to fall asleep, remember Ed?” The tingling at his throat attacks before he can get a word out, he coughs and she rubs his back while saying, “He was pretty restless, he kept waking up. Maybe we should have come in sooner?”  
  
Ed’s defense is currently being lost to his contracting throat. When he looks up, Dr. Marcoh has one of those sympathetic smiles plastered on his face. It’s a trademark look he knows like the back of his hand and that invariably elicits the same reaction in him — cringing.  
  
“Don’t worry, you did the right thing with the aid provided.” He slightly leans forward. “Do you have any history of respiratory problems?”  
  
Ed doesn’t know why he shakes his head again, maybe the motion just stuck with him, but it happens before he can stop it.  
  
He can practically hear Pinako’s glare.  
  
“Ed…” she starts.  
  
He feels like that time in which he stepped on a snail when leaving the house. He heard that distinct withering _crack_ , backtracked — removed his sole from the ground only to find a plastered shell and the gooey mess that’d given in under his weight.  
  
Missteps that he can’t take back.  
  
Dr. Marcoh looks between them in mild confusion. Maybe the way Winry then squeezes his arm has very poor timing. He flinches upright and stifles a hiss elicited with the force of the ache that travels up and down his humerus, his clavicle, his forearm, all the way to his tingling fingers. His bones are on fire.  
  
It feels like the entire world pauses for a moment.  
  
He wants to think — no, beg that he thought it was nothing, that Ed was just being weird. Restless, like she’d said. That’s believable enough, right? Jumpy, a scaredy cat. Still a toddler in mental age and _afraid_ of doctors and their wooden tongue depressors and their hypodermic needles, unable to keep eye contact with a medical professional. Still just as pathetic as he was years ago.  
  
Dr. Marcoh’s gaze zeroes in on him, Ed diverts his. Probably a wrong move. He hopes no one says anything.  
  
The man leans back into his seat and it squeaks as the leather pulls. “Actually, Miss Pinako —“  
  
“Please, doctor, you don’t have to suck up to me like that,” she answers, to which the doctor exhales breathy laughter.  
  
“Well then, Pinako, Winry,” he begins, whatever small amount of timidity at the previous title disappearing swiftly as a more resolute expression takes over him. Ed wants to fucking die. “Would the two of you mind waiting outside for a moment while Edward and I go through the checkup details? It won’t take very long.”  
  
The process in which one’s heart rockets through the body in a downward trajectory isn’t so painful as it is plain daunting. It leaves Ed’s chest so fast it actually pierces through his stomach and explodes onto the ground — which is the only explanation he can find as to why his insides are going crazy on him. Clawing, nagging.  
  
Trepidation climbing at his ribcage.  
  
He can feel both women tense at the request, he wants to look — again. To plead. Suddenly, he wishes this office were more on the traditional grounds, the static hum of light, the stench of disinfectant, the white coat…, it would make everything much clearer. But this guy isn’t even wearing the standard-issue medical lab garment, rather a pretty casual looking khaki button-up.  
  
He tries not to shudder too hard when Winry’s warm palms leave his back with one last fleeting caress. He immediately decides that he absolutely cannot start crying, not when this entire situation has been of his own making. He won’t fucking cry, dammit. She lightly tugs at his braid, the one she made. The one she wove with her own two hands earlier in the morning.  
  
He has to suppress a squeak at the slight pull. The strangled sound dies in his throat. He takes a breath and notes the office has a curious scent. Like worn wood and distant cough syrup. He might be about to add in the smell of puke, as he returns the entirety of that one bite of toast and a cup of Earl Grey he took an hour ago to the outside world.  
  
Pinako directs her distant voice at him to say they’ll be right outside. He nods on something like inertia, only this time he can’t stop his neck when it turns back towards them as they walk away. He doesn’t catch Winry’s expression, only the flip of her hair as she disappears beyond the door, it opens and a remote fragment of the upbeat, nostalgia-ridden melody he’d been hearing a few minutes ago flies in.  
  
It comes to land right on his lap. An eighties composition with a very distinct, sickly little nausea-inducing underbelly — that last thing, of his own addition. Its memorable rhythm’s sneaking its way into his memory.  
  
He turns back to Dr. Marcoh because there’s no way out if it isn’t through. He hears the man sigh. There’s a minute of silence for his attempt at bravery. Unfortunately, his labored breathing is also that much more perceptible. He sounds like a punctured lung, wheezing through its dying breaths as it drags itself through the murky pavement. He might have five years left to live.  
  
“So, Ed — do you mind if I call you Ed?” He never gets how this isn’t a loaded question, of _course_ , he doesn’t mind — he can’t, not without looking like a full-grown asshole.  
  
“Sure,” he rasps. Because for all his malice, he actually doesn’t disapprove. It’s fine. Whatever. Anyone can call him anything as long as it isn’t a mean slur or a curse word. He’s got pretty accessible standards, if you ask him.

A shaky breath finds its way into his messed up lungs, and by some miracle he doesn't barf all over this man's desk. That's a good start, supposedly. Maybe as good as he'll ever get.   
  
*  
  
He lets his head rest against the window on their way back. He lets it bump against the hard surface whenever Pinako doesn’t evade the potholes, he lets it hurt on particularly rough streets because he’s fucking _dying_.  
  
“That is not what he told you, Edward,” Pinako reprimands him while Winry groans, annoyed.  
  
“Yeah probably cause he couldn’t. He didn’t want to scare a minor,” he answers, not taking his eyes off the passing trees.  
  
Winry’s previous groan gets an extension at the tail-end of it, it takes over the car, it resonates in every corner as she slumps her head back into the seating, probably rolling her eyes so hard it’s gotta hurt.  
  
“He’s not like that,” she says. “First of all, and second of all, he literally just told you he wants to run a bronchoscopy, you massive drama queen.”  
  
A routine enough test, yeah, but third of all is the fact that he is going to find something nasty, no doubt about it. His insides are probably all torn up, slicked up with a layer of filth from where the smoke decided to make a home.  
  
He can still feel the stethoscope’s diaphragm on his chest, hard and unforgiving. Marcoh’s disquiet as he attempted deep breaths.  
  
He did tell him a few things while they were alone. Ed lets them roll over his mind in a more or less ordered succession of _“Judging by the sound of it, Ed, you’ve developed some degree of an inhalation injury”_ and “ _For how long were you exposed to the substance?_ ”  
  
He hadn’t known how to explain to him that time is a measurement unit made obsolete by the tides of survival. That he hadn’t managed to get away. That he hadn’t even been able to crawl. That at some point, he just closed his eyes and tried really hard not to breathe and just laid there. Laid down and waited. Like an animal.  
  
“I don’t know,” he’d answered in the spirit of absolute sincerity.   
  
“Well, give me a ballpark,” Marcoh insisted.  
  
“I’d be lying.”

Marcoh sighed and asked.   
  
_“Does it hurt when you breathe in?”_ before _, "_ _For how long did you say you were hospitalized?”_ but after _“I don’t assume you have your medical record with you?”_ and _“Did they ever intubate you?”_

Ed swallows. Sleep starts winking at him. He welcomes it with a little hesitance.  
  
He hears himself. He hears the heel of his boot thumping nervously against the examination bed’s metal support as the doctor goes for his prescription notes.  
  
“ _Give me zolpidem, give me Duragesic. Lorcet, Vicodin,_ ” he thought. “ _Fill me the fuck up._ ” He bit his tongue down. Instead, he listened to the pen’s indistinct scribble and said something like,  
  
“ _Um, there’s this medication they used to give me, it really helped with the ache,_ ” Ultram. “ _Though_ _I don’t remember it’s name right now_...” Ultram.  
  
He scratched his chin while pretending to think. “ _It was something…, Something like…_ ” Ultram. Ultram. Ultram. “ _With a ‘U’, like with the word ‘ultra’ in it. I don’t know —”_  
  
“ _Ultram?_ ” Dr. Marcoh shot him an owlish gaze.  
  
And heavens sang. And Ed snapped his fingers and said “ _Yeah, I slept straight through the night, it really, really helped me out._ ”  
  
Another bump comes up, his head slightly bangs against the crystal. He turns to look at the paper baggie they gave them at the pharmacy and that Marcoh swore to him came free of charge for Pinako.  
  
An inhaler, a shitload of formoterol, chamomile eye drops, a note with directions for the lab to test him and a scribbled date for his next appointment.

No fucking Ultram. Ed’s phone burns through his pocket.  
  
He knows who to call. He knows what he’d have to do — should he to be so desperate, should he actually want it. But he doesn’t. He’s made it so far without any pills and he doesn’t need them now, not really, not in a way that’s compromising. He’d simply _like_ it. He’d like it very much, and there isn't anything problematic in acknowledging that fact.   
  
The first day of October makes itself known. Some scattered raindrops tap against the window. He doesn’t text Greg — he falls asleep.  
  
*  
  
They arrive home and he doesn’t leave for another two days.  
  
They convince him to stay over for the rest of the day. Then, to sleep in the guest room. Then, Winry makes her intentions known when he tries sneaking out of the house Tuesday morning before the birds start chirping.  
  
“I am officially kidnapping you, Edward,” she tells him while hugging a pillow to her chest. Expression dead serious.  
  
She makes him skip class to sit next to her in the garage while she rolls herself under a car and he passes her all the wrong tools and wrenches. He goes with it while ignoring the texts Luisa sent him,  
  
“ _u alive?_ ”  
  
“ _come back soon Dante’s pissed_ ”  
  
She makes him watch Queer Eye with her at night while Pinako takes some calls from the living room and they eat mac ‘n’ cheese. It occurs to him that she didn’t once ask about the bruising below his eyes, even though it’s mostly faded by now, it’s ever-present. He’s glad — he wouldn’t know what to say. “ _You should’ve seen the other guy_ ” would probably be the right answer, except his mind immediately offers to counter with the eternally unhelpful thought of, “ _Fucking hell_ h _ave you_ seen _the other guy?_ ”  
  
She makes him hit the sack at around 8:30 pm, and he isn’t complaining about that. He goes with it while ignoring the growing ache, the burning muscles that tense at the back of his knee and make it impossible for him to stretch his leg properly.   
  
When the next day rolls around, he pleads with her in earnest.  
  
“Izumi’s going to kill me,” he says. It’s 7:45 am.  
  
“I’ll kill you first, problem solved,” she says while cracking some eggs in a pan.  
  
“She’ll figure out a way to bring me back just so she can kill me again.”  
  
She sighs while adding some pepper and then idly stares at the stove in front of her. A moment passes in which the kitchen is only filled by the sound of sizzling eggs.  
  
“You really want to go back? I mean — you sure you’re feeling it?” She turns to him while holding the spatula in her right hand, he nods. Pinako is next to him at the table, topping up her coffee cup when she says,  
  
“If you believe you’re feeling better, then you shouldn’t accumulate more absences. We wouldn’t want it affecting such a pristine track record, now,” she adds with just a tiny little bit of smugness, there at the end. It wouldn’t be a statement worthy of Pinako Rockbell were it not for finely veiled and perfectly executed snark. Ed is but a tad jealous of how articulate this woman’s grumpiness is. “And you need to get back someday too, Winry,” she adds.  
  
Winry huffs, then looks over at Ed and smiles. Yet again, it doesn’t quite reach her eyes. She makes a dissatisfied noise, but doesn’t argue against Pinako’s resolve.  
  
“Yeah…, Okay, I guess. I was just thinking — I mean.” The way she momentarily nibbles at her upper lip suggests she doesn’t want to say what she does out loud. She stares down at the half-cooked egg whites in front of her, like she’s entranced for a moment. He knows enough about her own fears to deduce what she’ll say next.  
  
Winry is so easy to like, to socialize with, to speak to. Friendship comes like second nature to her. Winry surrounds herself with constant stimulation, a lotta people, in short. And yet no one is ever even mildly disposable, in her conception of them. It’s not only that Ed was impressed by how much she seemingly enjoyed spending time with him, it’s that every inch of ‘closer’ they became, she took as conquered ground. Never to be yielded, never to retreat.  
  
He knows that after her parents died, she felt as though nothing was holding her together. Because the world was a vast, cataclysmic, violent thing. A broken compass with no ‘up’ or ‘down’, and her mom and dad had fallen prey to a randomized airstrike that fell over a city already reduced to dust, out in the Middle East. She imagined heaps of silent sand, rubble and concrete burying their bodies along with those of the wounded civilians who hadn’t made it out on time after some peace-holding troops had been ordered to retreat from the area, effective-immediately, abandoned to the whims of destiny. She thought of their scattered bones, all the way over on the other side of the pacific ocean.  
  
Life is so fragile to her, then, and so was her aging grandmother, Pinako. She feared with too much vehemence the day in which she woke up to find her dead, cold body amongst her bedsheets. To find the only person who stood between her and the interminable abyss of absolute loneliness, her only remaining family member, the only form of closeness she had left, gone. She trembled at the thought of her slowing movements, her accumulating wrinkles, the first signs of very faint arthritis.  
  
He knows she’s willing to hold him the way she does because she can also see some of herself within him, through the cracks and bruises, the jagged ends and the salty, bitter tears. His patchwork sense of self. She can _see._  
  
“This time of the year’s really tough on you,” she all but mutters while scratching her nose. It seems more like she’s saying it to herself, trying to mechanize through the circumstance of Ed’s clusterfuck of a life.  
  
He doesn’t say anything, simply because there is nothing to be said. That happens with practically all similar statements — objective assessments that come with a shitload of baggage, yes, but what of it? There’s just nothing to be done. This month has to happen in order for the year to move along; birds gotta shit in order not to explode, and so on.  
  
Winry looks back at him and their eyes barely meet before she nods.  
  
“Alright, I — damn, it’s late. Let me go change real quick. Don’t let ‘em burn.” She hands the spatula to Ed and hurries out.  
  
Pinako sips her coffee while zeroing in on the newspaper she’s got in front of her, slightly bent at the upper left edge by her deft hand. Ed gets up to check on the scrambled eggs and doesn’t immediately register that she’s speaking to him when she does, thinking it might be one of her out-loud commentary on the great and generalized State Of Things in the country.  
  
“Do you want to go back to your house?” she asks without looking up at him. It’s a knowing tone, but this isn’t about _want_. It never has been.  
  
“I…, I have to, yeah,” he says. She hums. He keeps poking at the egg mass with the plastic utensil. Stirring. Pushing.  
  
“Do come by on Friday, then,” She moves to turn the page, “I’m thinking stew.” This woman knows exactly where his buttons are, and which ones go where, along with all about when and where to press then, as well as when and where to leave them be. She is a deft mechanic, after all. There are probably a thousand car radios far more complex than him.  
  
Ed grins.   
  
“Fuck yeah.”  
  
“Language,” Pinako tuts, her voice is sometimes acutely worn, but he hears the smile in it.

*

8:57 am  
  
They arrive on screeching wheels. They say their hasty goodbyes and he promises he’ll get her clothes back by tomorrow. She waves her hand dismissively,  
  
“I told you, you look good like that.” Ed rolls his eyes, because the implications of what that elicits in him are far too many and far too heavy and he still feels too sick to think straight.  
  
She walks past him in the hall, only turning her head back to yell,  
  
“At least keep the shirt!” She grins in the distance. Ed throws what he hopes is a pretty non-committal hand gesture back while rolling the combination into his locker.  
  
He opens it to find a mysterious piece of paper, folded many times. It sits over his Biology textbook, but it’s too close to the edge to have been placed by someone who broke in. The horizontal openings in these standard locker door designs seem more like the answer as to how it got in. Ed doesn’t understand what they’re for, he guesses whoever designed them had the bullied kids who get stuck inside for hours on end’s best interest at heart. Ventilation is key.  
  
The point is, there’s an ominous piece of notebook paper folded right in front of him. And it isn’t his, he’s sure.  
  
He gingerly dives his hand in and takes the folded page of — hopefully _not_ fucking anthrax — mysterious origin with his left hand. He’d finally mustered up the courage and asked Winry if she had any spare gloves lying around, anything she might’ve used while going upstate for Christmas — so he’s feeling pretty brave today. He might be on a roll.

He hesitantly looks around himself, but there really isn’t anything too suspicious about the way in which people are walking past him, or the way some lights flicker in the hall. Deficient lighting is just up to its usual standard.   
  
He looks at the damn thing again, and moves to unfold it. When the pills fall out as he extends the paper, real panic strikes. He immediately takes a hissed breath in and drops to his knees to retrieve the offending pieces, hoping their clatter didn’t alert anyone of his possible possession of some pretty sketchy substances as he mutters through the obliged "Shit, shit, _shit_."

He wouldn’t argue that they came to simply “appear” in front of him, like some circumstantial, magical mysteries of the world would have it, were someone to catch him. He shudders while hastily gathering them in his hands.  
  
There’s thankfully not many, because his knee is screaming from below and getting up is going to prove increasingly challenging the more he remains on the ground. His peroneal nerve has the least patience, though, and once his left fist closes around the tablets, his right leg’s strength isn’t enough to coax his left into straightening up to stand.

Fuck.

Kids keep walking past. Freshmen running towards their classes with bubbling energy. He hates that this district’s school is so damn big.  
  
There are so many fucking people everywhere.  
  
Their voices wash over him, he knows no-one’s looking.  
  
Still, a thin, cold layer of dreadful sweat starts rising to his skin’s surface as he looks at the front of his locker head-on. He tries again. The pain flashes at him, his knee hits the floor just as it had managed to lift it a few centimeters. The bell rings. His next attempt doesn't even get him as far.   
  
The lights around him cackle, far too bright. Far too much. Fuck, fuck, _fuck._  
  
Gravity pulls him down with gusto every time he even thinks of it, but he looks up — he looks up at his goal, at where his books are kept, at his belongings, at where he stood just seconds ago, on his own two feet, like extended millennia of biological evolution would have wanted it.  
  
He bites the inside of his cheek and takes a sharp breath in. It’s so far away, like a perpetually expanding tunnel amidst the blazing hot-and-cold of his limb’s malfunction. It’s gonna hurt, but so is staying put, eventually. He can see the other side, there’s only one thing to do.  
  
He enlists the help of his right hand and pushes himself up on an empty tank of stamina and his entire brain melts for a second but then he’s made it. He grabs a hold of the open door to steady himself, his other hand in a fist, placed on the inside of the locker, his entire torso leans forward, like he’s trying to disappear into its cold darkness. To be eaten by it. He stays doubled over like that while catching his breath, letting it conceal his entire face.  
  
What is he, 15 or 51? Man, what a terrible joke. He musters up a choked off snicker.  
  
This oughta qualify as his daily dose of exercise — or more like it better, because he isn’t moving again, ever, for the rest of his miserable goddamned fucking headfucked thing of a life. He takes a deep breath, he goes through the breathing routine that’s so old he feels like he’s always known it, like he’d been practicing it from the placenta, getting ready for a life with chronic pain. In, hold for five seconds, out.  
  
Eventually, he feels brave enough to emerge and look at his hand, it takes some time and effort, but he eventually manages to un-clutch his fist and extend his fingers to look at his palm’s contents.  
  
Yellow. A dulled type, like dirtied mustard. But he knows it.  
  
His breath then catches as a sort of understanding dawns on him. He reaches for the paper he threw inside with his gloved hand, he turns it upon briefly squinting at the prominent lines left by the folds. Lo and behold, some writing materializes in front of him. A slightly smudged pen.  
  
This can’t be happening.  
  
It probably isn’t. Evie finally sent him to meet his maker and this is but a subconscious manifestation of his last working neuronal connections before his system finally gives into death’s loving arms. What a sweet dream he got; finally awarded all the medication that can be bought on a month’s wage.  
  
God — or whatever — has given him one last hallucinatory sprint in which he finally gets, as that cookoff show says, Some Good Fucking Food.   
  
Yeah, that’s gotta be it. Otherwise, it means,  
  
 _“I know you said no oxy, but a few free samples can’t hurt, -Youknowho dawg.”_  
  
Smiley wink face.  
  
The end of the world.  
  
The second bell comes and he almost jumps into the fucking roof.  
  
He looks at his hand. “… This motherfucker… “ he mutters to himself.  
  
But contemplation is for fools. He’s already late. His knee pulls on all his tendons, he groans.  
  
He takes one in his mouth.  
  
There should be a drinking fountain nearby, there’s no time to grind it.  
  
He moves to close the locker, when the door reveals a face, sculpted on pristine marble. A moving Adam’s apple, a light gray sweatshirt with the sleeves slightly rolled up, a white button-up shirt’s showing over the collar.  
  
Eyes as black as a moonless night. Shit.  
  
“Hey.” Comes a voice smooth as velvet and deep as… Whatever in the world is a bottomless pit. An infinite well he could throw himself into and grow old and die in while still falling. He’s not good with metaphors.  
  
He freezes.  
  
Mustang.  
  
That his first impulse is to apologize for looking like miserable shit probably isn’t a good sign. It’s just what feels like the polite thing to do when standing next to such a well-put-together composition. A composition that is currently addressing him. _Him_.  
  
What would be nice is to answer when someone talks directly to you, but there is currently a tab of fucking oxycontin held between his teeth. How many grams is it, by the way? How long will he be willing play this game with himself before just giving into the age-old philosophical inquiry of Who The Fuck Cares?  
  
He realizes it’s been a couple of too-long seconds since the guy in front of him tried engaging in some verbal conversation, so he hastily takes the pill out of his mouth between thumb and index, careful not to unclench the rest of his hand and have its contents slip again and cause armageddon to actually happen.  
  
“Um, h-hey.” The sound of his voice almost makes him wince. He hadn’t thought about how ragged he sounds, he doesn’t feel the need to modulate when with Winry, but now it seems off. Wildly inadequate. Mustang must think him a complete mess, except he’s looking as impassive as ever, and Ed suddenly remembers what a master of facial expression this dude is.  
  
It’s either that, or he is the absolute most indifferent human being to have ever walked the earth.  
  
It shouldn’t be this appealing.  
  
“So, Falman said you’d be into this.” He speaks — again. Like…, like nothing. Nothing he’d ever heard before. No one. The sound of him expands all over his personal space, it bursts his bubble, it resonates against the insides of his skull and hums. It’s like he’s staring off into space, his eyes refuse to peel off skin that looks so soft it’s unnatural. Unreal. Most pressing of all, though, is the idea that he might want to get a hold of himself sooner rather than later.  
  
He swallows and looks behind him. Real quick. Just to check.  
  
Everyone’s suddenly gone. This is definitely a comatose delusion of his, the dull palpitations in his chest are a sweet reminder of the all-encompassing, bone-obliterating pain coursing up and down his leg at the moment. His breath comes out clipped and shallow as he moves to take the book in his hands, his mind working at a hundred miles per hour to solve the mechanics of not drawing too much attention to his right hand while not uncurling his left while also accepting Vato’s gift.  
  
Vato Falman. He remembers being approached by him straight after class, on that day he likes to refer to in his memory’s archive as his No-Good-Massive-Shitshow-Circus-Debut, in which he got called out for being a shit-poor, snotty-ass kid with a commie stick up his ass while everyone watched — nay, stared at him like he was an exotic Bengal tiger having a seizure mid-zoo.  
  
That whole cold-war dialectic crashing down on him, all while the extra Ritalin made itself known and present as the added substance clashed horribly with half a liter of shit coffee and too many sugar spoonfuls, pulsating outwards, like bursting out of his every pore with sharp focus and burgeoning hyperactivity — and this very Roy Mustang arched his eyebrows at him in an expression of mixed bewilderment and concern.  
  
He hadn’t been able to stop talking. Everything was just so absurd. He got their cues of annoyed curiosity as Mr. Kimblee’s mouth bitterly quirked but he could not for the life of him stop. Word after word after word of crushing shame that would later fill his head as he tried burying it under his pillow to forget he was ever born.  
  
He’d walked home that day while the effect wore off and left his brain scoured out of whatever little endorphins he’d managed to come up with during the past 48 hours, dragging his feet like a grubby worm, nausea tickling his windpipe, feeling the unrelenting pull of sleep and exhaustion. And he’d thought to himself, what a journey. He’d collapsed into his bed with a little more force than usual, wanting to turn to ethanol, to evaporate.  
  
He remembers.  
  
Vato had come up to him straight after class and introduced himself with a handshake and didn’t react to his covered hand. He talked to him with genuine interest about the subject matter, the whole socialist shenanigan, he cited historical strike dates off the top of his mind and offered to give him the book Roy now had for some reason.  
  
Ed had accepted because, after Kimblee, he’d wanted to feel human again. As simple as that.   
  
Now that he’s actually opening the damn thing, though, hearing how it cracks at the spine from how _new_ it is, how pristine the edition looks, how top-tier expensive the whole deal must be… He’s having second thoughts about accepting it.  
  
He knows a great deal about the epic publishing battles that go down in the world of printed media thanks to his day job — his day job with constant added commentary from none other than Sheska herself. So he knows. This isn’t just anything.  
  
“This is… Is this the original edition?” He feels his knees wobbling, he doesn’t know why he’s asking Roy. If anything, Vato got abducted by aliens or got a serious case of food poisoning, because of which his friend here was entrusted with the vexing duty of putting his affairs in order for him while he disappeared to outer space or was severely indisposed. He shouldn’t make assumptions. He might be coming off as incredibly snobby. Yikes.  
  
But Roy hums. “Printed in Sussex and all.” He cocks his head in the book’s direction, casual-like, as Ed tries real hard not to drop it with how hard he’s shaking.  
  
It’s all conspiring to make him burst into human bruschetta; the emotional nerves; his _literal_ jacked up nerves; Greg’s un-requested little surprise advance Christmas gift; his sudden hyper-awareness of being dressed in Winry’s clothes — not that there’s anything wrong with them, when she’s the one using them, that is. Neither when he is, he guesses, they’re comfortable as fuck. It’s the shirts she uses to sleep in for a reason, and they smell so good. The color’s whatever, it’s just a color, right? Just a damn color he shouldn’t be thinking so much about.  
  
He has to shut the fuck up.  
  
Printed in Sussex. So this guy is cultured and refined, huh — he should have guessed as much from the way he speaks. The inflection of his voice, the careful modulation of it as he perfectly pronounces every single letter in every single word yet somehow doesn’t come off as uptight, either. He knows his shit.  
  
But it’s more than that, Ed muses as he idly flips through the pages — if only to have something to use his hands on while standing in front of Mustang — … He’s probably paged through this himself.  
  
“You’ve… You’ve read it?” He internally winces again, that shouldn’t have come off as such a surprise, what is he trying to insinuate, with a tone like that? Man, what a dick.  
  
Except Mustang just shrugs, unbothered, slightly leaned against the locker next to his, forearms folded across his chest, legs also slightly crossed while he tosses his weight against these school-issued aluminum boxes. He’s from like a Levi’s commercial. Somebody, send help.  
  
“A page or two, I hope you don’t mind…” He says it like a mere formality, because were Ed to “mind”, he guesses he wouldn’t truly give a rat’s ass.  
  
Now’s as good a time as any to swallow more than his sticky saliva. He hopes to God Mustang doesn’t notice and takes a moment in which his charcoaled eyes linger on the page in front of him to throw the oxy into his mouth and down it. He’ll snort the other ones later, he has the quantity to do so. A little excitement flickers at the thought. He couldn’t even think to count them, but there’s the ballpark quantity of ‘a lot’ in his hand. Holy shit, holy _shit._  
  
When he turns a page to find his handwriting, the world tips a little.  
  
His head instinctively turns to make out the note on the paper’s edge, besides a few finely underlined sentences. It’s a light and classically tilted cursive, it’s symmetrical and constant in its presentation, and ever-so-slightly bordering on the “illegible” — like someone who writes with some haste and a relaxed yet dexterous wrist. A hand suited for writing without even looking — one that’d be perfectly made for the task of scribbling on checkbooks with uninterested finesse or some shit like that.  
  
His mouth is dry. He hopes these pills are of the slow release types.  
  
When he denotes the detail out loud, he doesn’t mean to. The words just leave him. When Mustang then implies he should erase it, he tenses. He catches himself wanting to resolutely shake his head and scoff at such a suggestion.  
  
He needs to cool it, so he tries a casual tenor and says,  
  
“It’s cool.” It’s not.  
  
Nothing about this interaction is natural. Starting from the fact that it’s all in his head. The Matrix might think it has him fooled, but it made its first mistake when trying to have him believe Mustang would just linger beside him while he tries to compute how a volume that probably costs more that what he earns in three months could just be his. Moreover, that such a gift would come with Mustang’s very own written commentary.  
  
He arches his eyebrows at him in a mildly amused way, Ed feels his neck start to warm. Time to look at anything but him.  
  
He hates his face, his entire being.  
  
He hates noticing Mustang’s eyes like that. The defined tendons in his forearms, the casual fall of his fluffed our hair. He wants the pill to hit him already, and hit him hard. To knock him out of the world. The volume in his hands is too heavy. The back of his knee too insistent.  
  
He says something else, some mindless blubber that bursts out of him without consent. Something about his own handwriting that Mustang doesn’t seem too interested in, but for some reason he doesn’t move from where he is — nor looks like he wants to leave — until one of the hall’s shepherd comes onto them with a clipped, hurried tone and reprimand them into getting a move-on.   
  
Ed wants to say ‘thanks again’ but it gets lost in the intention.  
  
“See you around,” Mustang tells him as he casually adjusts the strap on his shoulder and turns on his heel.  
  
Ed doesn’t know how one is supposed to answer to that so he tries a friendly smile. He walks towards the opposite direction and really can’t help it when his neck acquires a mind of his own and turns his head to look back at him. Mustang disappears around the corner without looking over his shoulder once, and that’s probably a good thing.  
  
Ed works the spit in his mouth. From the tastes of it, it’s the 20mg OxyContin.  
  
For all his clownery, Greg really knows how to hit home, he might have a sixth sense. A smile threatens to quirk the corners of his mouth.  
  
*

  
The little analgesic has worked it’s magic and taken full effect by when lunchtime rolls around. He doesn’t even notice when Ling’s persistent arm drapes itself around his shoulders like he’s slumping his weight into him — well, maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration, seeing as said arm really is dead set on annoying the crap out of him as Ling squeezes his torso onto his chest.  
  
“I’ve been looking for you, man! Word had it you were dead! You can’t imagine how much the possibility upset me — I never got a chance of getting to know you better. I tried getting your number from someone in your chem class but alas, as rumor would have it, you’re an absolute enigma. Let’s not dwell on the past, though, shall we?” Ed’s feet move underneath him without connection to his brian’s operational center.  
  
They’ve revolted and founded an autonomous assembly of motor skill affairs. They’ve unanimously decided to follow Ling’s lead.  
  
He’d forgotten how weird it can feel to walk in this state, especially since it’d been a while since he last got into it.  
  
Why had it been so long, by the way? At the moment, he can’t bring himself to remember.  
  
“I’m so glad I ran into you.” _Ran into me? You probably found out where I live_ , Ed can’t say. His tongue is putty in his mouth, resting against a wall of saliva like a fat slug. He doesn’t want to wake it. “My Co - Star app said I’d be in luck today.”  
  
“But anyway, you should know, party’s getting moved up until next Friday — so that’s eight days from this one — Ugh, I know, right? But there’s no way around it. It was supposed to be this homecoming thing for my friend Anna, she’s coming from back from her dad’s house in Berlin but her flight got changed and — Oh, shit! She’s gonna smuggle us some pretty crazy shit from her weekend trip to Amsterdam, let’s just not ask how she’ll go about it, right?” He cackles, “I mean, his uncle is like an ambassador or something so whatever happens, she’ll be totally kosher. But I hear they got some amazing acid up there, so everyone’ll be eager to get some good ol’ scientific data to see just how different it is to our usual. And she’ll probably be down to pay you in some fine and dandy euro-currency. Pretty neat, huh?”  
  
He attempts a smile and gives up midway because he isn’t sure he just heard all that correctly.  
  
“By the way,” the way he hesitates also catches a sliver of his lethargic attention, the air sort of stutters on his mouth for a moment and his usual nutty smile seems to pause. “You’re not _mad_ at me, are you?” he asks.  
  
Ed would also laugh at the fact that only someone like Ling would think to pose such a question after a half-hour long casual rambling about his posh friends and their European sticking-illegal-substances-up-my-ass adventures while holding such physical proximity.  
  
But Ed just blinks at him as they make their way around the one-o-clock sweat and noise of clustered bodies in the hall.  
  
“Y’know, I was only kidding with the whole Mustang thing and I’m sorry if it made you uncomfortable, yeah?” He recites the last half like he’s reading it off the palm on his hand, like someone wrote it on smudged ink for him not to forget. Ed wonders who the person who told him to apologize was.  
  
He clears his throat at Ling’s expecting gaze. “Uhm, okay. Yeah. It’s okay.” It really isn’t _his_ fault that Ed gets weird and his brain short-circuits whenever someone refers to him through typically feminine adjectives. So it’s fine. And it’s like Ling’s eyes throw fireworks at him.  
  
“ _Great._ ” He grins widely, and still — it looks like he’s actually suppressing a larger, legendary original monster-sized super shit-eating-grin.  
  
“So!” He goes on, “You’ll want to give me your number now, for reals.”  
  
Ed’s glad everything feels easier in this state, like he’s drenched in olive oil. He slides his phone out with mild resignation and hands it to Ling’s eager fingers.  
  
*  
  
He takes it slow on the way back home. The book inside his bag feels like it’s burning a hole against his thigh, like it’s poking at him with every slight rhythmic swish that goes along with the slack in his steps. His shoulder reminds him of it through the pressure applied by the strap as it weighs him down.  
  
For once, he doesn’t mind it. It comes through with some amount of trepidation, even though the reason for it remains frustratingly out of reach. The faint sickness in his stomach is a testament to reasons unknown. Ominous threats the overcast afternoon sky keeps throwing his way.  
  
He’s never been especially dense while reading through highly specialized academic material — he’s just not used to it being philosophically themed. Throw any cumulus of snazzy vocabulary his way and he’ll figure it out fast enough, so long as it’s predominating subject is related to peptic bonds, balanced equations or malt sugar composition expressed through an α(1→4). This, though, isn’t really his area of expertise.  
  
It's also not the only weight that’s tugging at him. He’s at the point in which debating between having himself another pill or letting however little amount of natural tiredness he’s accumulated throughout the day pull him under is in order. Once the thought settles, but before his internal monologue even begins, he already gets a sense of what he knows will be decided, inevitably. One way or another.  
  
Oh, well. He can’t let himself be too wary of something that’s never done anything other than save his ass on repeated occasions and in very glorious ways.  
  
He can look at it from every angle he wants, there’s really nothing worse than not being able to do things by yourself, especially when it comes to such basic shit. Walking. Standing up. Taking a literal shit. Too many times he’s had to suppress the urge to just end himself then and there in favor of hauling himself up with the help of the plastic toilet paper dispenser on his right because, again, his knee decided it was going to have itself a much deserved one-week vacation for the third time in a month and leave him with a rigid, clustered up stone for a muscle. That’s also why he doesn’t kneel anymore when bending down to snort his Concerta; his phone’s screen has served that purpose well enough in between classes.  
  
He arrives home. He takes a breath and holds it while maneuvering his keys out of his back pocket. He looks down and watches himself work the lock, distantly contemplating the slight jingle of the key ring against the short metal chain that links it to his belt’s hoop. The door opens and he slides inside through the very slight opening he left before gently pushing it closed.  
  
It’s silent, which doesn’t really go in accordance with the normal run of things, then again he can’t do much other than start inching himself forward even if his feet seem obstinately drawn to their place on the ratty old ‘welcome home’ carpet underneath. He goes on towards the stairs, hoping in advance that today’s not the day in which they cave.  
  
He makes it upstairs with relative ease. When he sees the yellow light spilling out of Dante’s open door, just a few feet across from him, his breath starts coming hot and sticky. He stays put at the top of the stairs, his hand tightened around the wooden knob in its railing. She must’ve heard the door even if he thinks he went carefully about closing it. When he goes to take the turn in order to go towards his room, it’s only because he thinks it’s at least worth the shot, not because he’s trying to make matters worse.  
  
“Just how stupid do you think I am?” comes her ragged voice from beyond the door. His knee joints always take stress first; they both tense and go boneless in one same beat of tingling apprehension. One doesn’t have to be a genius to figure out she wasn’t talking to her TV set, just now.  
  
“Edward,” she commands, her voice teetering on annoyance at the fact that she seemingly has to emphasize her point.  
  
“Yeah,” he breathes but, hell, _breathes_. He hopes she heard him while he instantly leaves his bag by the hall and makes his way towards her room.  
  
He arrives at the other side of the door and feels the slight whoosh of frigid air coming from within, he hears the rhythmic metal tinkling of the old ceiling fan, he hears the distant tumble of a male voice accompanied by the typical sound of television static and looks down to see innocuously yellow luminescence sliding out, just an inch shy from the toe of his shoe. Just about to eat him whole.  
  
He doesn’t realize he’s holding his breath again until Dante’s voice pierces through the door, as if her very eyes were watching him through the other side of the wooden length.  
  
“Come in,” she says. His intestines start tangling into each other earnestly, now. It hurts. He bites the inside of his cheek and gingerly brings a hand up to push the door open.  
  
It’s a witch, a myth, a specter of all things ominous that looks at him through two thin glimmering glass lenses sitting at the edge of her rigid nose. Ed knows it isn’t healthy to dehumanize her just to make it bearable, but most days he’s just lucky if he manages to forget she exists altogether, which makes these types of confrontations all the more daunting. At the moment, she is very much here.  
  
She crooks her neck from the small TV screen in front of her chair to look at the doorway in which he expects to be allowed to simply loiter in for the foreseeable future. She blinks, unamused, her right elbow propped on one of the chair’s railings, her fingers doing these idle movements, emphasized through the length of her bare, pointy nails.  
  
She runs her index up and down the length of her thumb. Up, down. Up, down.  
  
“Where did you run off to, this time?” she asks before turning back towards the screen. Sometimes her tone is unreadable, and those are the times in which shit hovers in the air, just above his head, levitating closer and closer towards the fan on the roof.  
  
He never makes it out on time.  
  
Ed works the spit in his mouth. Finds that there is none.  
  
“Well?” She prods, not a second later. Whatever sliver of patience this woman has managed to salvage from the wreckage of bitter old age, it’s not making an appearance for his sake.  
  
“N-nowhere. I mean, just a friend's house. It’s not — it’s not very far from here.” His voice sounds awful when he doesn’t know what he’s saying. Like all the worst things in the world he wishes weren’t ingrained inside his own character. Doubt, fear, crippling insecurity.  
  
“Oh, goodie,” She retorts in a low voice, ragged, dripping sarcasm. His blood turns frigid. His right shoulder twinges.  
  
“Sorry—” He immediately goes for.  
  
“I heard Evie gave you a hard time,” She starts at the tail end of his last word, denoting her lack of interest in whatever plead he’s ready to make tonight. “I’ve already talked to her. She can be such a brute… Do you care to recount your version of the story?”  
  
The room combines the house’s humid stench of rotten plants, only it’s colder and smothered in all types of shit. Empty boxes; overcrowded drawers; nondescript manila folders filled with nondescript documents; a myriad of distinct pieces of probably-fake jewelry.  
  
Ed shakes his head, then clears his throat, a split second later realizing she’s not looking at him. “No, it’s, it’s fine.”  
  
Her left hand is resting on the pink quilt draped over her lap. She’s using all of her rings. All those beetle-colored over-the-top gems that catch the light and wink at him in macabre excitement.  
  
A beat passes, she lets out a forceful sigh. “Come over here, will you?”  
  
He does, because what the fuck else can be done? He’s a non-person while living under this roof. That’s what non-people do. That’s what he has to do. Because it could be worse, and he could be dead, and the fire might have caught up to his entire face and taken Al with it too but it didn’t. It didn’t. And he’s here now, and he knows the rules of the game.  
  
When he arrives at her side, she turns to look up at him, face near impassive were it not for the tiny smile playing at the corners of her mouth. The lines of her face accentuate her intention. He tries not to shudder.  
  
“Do you know what day it was yesterday?” she asks.  
  
“Uh, the first?”  
  
“Is that a question or are you certain,” She deadpans, rapidly, wasting no time. Taking no prisoners. Either she just wants to get on with her viewing of Jeopardy, or her sense of wrath is feeling a bit more prefunctory than usual today. Maybe it’s both.  
  
“It was the first,” he asserts, not able to fully meet her gaze, settling for the brooch that rests on the base of her neck, where soggy skin gets covered by a thin scarf. If he continued down that trail, he’d find her swollen legs at the base of the chair, barely concealed by her quilt and skirt, threatening to burst through her tight shoes.  
  
It isn’t the first time he wished diabetes was faster. Or more time-consuming. Or overall more distracting, so he could just merge in with the wallpaper and die while she gave herself the nightly insulin shot.  
  
“And what happens on the first of every month, Edward?” He saw where this was going, but she’s the one in charge here. She sets the pace of his punishment. Not him. Not him, not him, not him. It has to be okay.  
  
“CPS comes around,” he sort of whispers, because he still doesn’t want to be right.  
  
Dante hums, still looking straight through his skull. None of the accumulated objects around this room take pity on him — that’s alright.  
  
“And where, pray tell, where you while that was happening?”  
  
Ed looks at his shoes and blinks a couple of times. He grinds his teeth together, then unclenches his jaw just enough to let the words out.  
  
“Not — here.”  
  
Still, after all these years, nothing really prepares him for the moment in which she reaches for his hand with her left one, tugs him down to bend over her and administer one swift cuff to the head, through which his balance is tipped enough for him to stumble on his side. The rings on those fingers are huge, too. He resents her mastered technique, through which she’s worked out just how much force and how much slack she has to allow and how she’s got to angle her hand for the metal loops to hurt the most.  
  
He’s lost in the sound of an audience laughing behind him, on the tv set. They lift their hands and scream in mindless glee and show their teeth to the anchor. Ed can’t see them, but they’re there. The wheels in front of him roll near and close the distance between them in one single movement.  
  
He’s on his knees, cradling the side of his head with his right arm, using his left for support. The right wheel doesn’t stop until it’s rolling over his extended palm, and it takes everything to suppress the whimper that threatens to break out of his throat, to materialize into fat, ugly tears.  
  
The world spins around him; up and down, left and right, east-west, southwest, northeast, the only anchor is the bone-crushing needle weighing down on his hand. Thank you. Thank you. He knows where he is.  
  
The carpet underneath is unyielding. The pain is — Oh, the pain! Joy to the world! It won’t stop, it won’t stop. It won’t.  
  
Who woulda said rubber wheels felt so deadly. He won’t look up at her, but maybe he should, but maybe he can’t. He isn’t looking at anything, his vision splotches of nasty shadows, he’s blind. _He’s blind!_ The ceiling fan over him keeps ticking away as tears start gathering in his eyes. He won't cry. He won't.   
  
The sound tearing at his mouth is now something like laughter, it tastes sweet and salty and rotten and she’s speaking, she’s using her _tone._  
  
“You are so, so lucky to be a boy with special needs. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be touched to let you stay under my roof for a second longer, be sure of that.”  
  
The wheel retreats. His breath — where’d it go? She orders him out of her room and he hurriedly scrambles, squirms, _crawls_ outside. Fuck _that_. He made the right call to leave his shit in the hall. He scrapes for air, his room isn’t far, now. He can see it. He can taste the safety of a locked door.   
  
“And close the damn door!” she yells after him.  
  
*  
  
3:55 pm.  
  
He doesn’t know how long he’s been like this, but slumping against the wall seems like an okay-enough position to be in, at least for now. He hears on and off shuffling downstairs. He opens his eyes just a bit and closes them again after the particularly banal sight of darkened wood boards greet him. He takes a ragged breath in — it hasn't been that long since he stopped hyperventilating, but he hasn't a thorough grasp of time. It also somehow feels like he never stopped.   
  
He took another oxy, first thing after escaping the claws of death. It’s starting to work it’s way into his system, cushioning his brain.  
  
There’s a nasty red impact line at his hand that’ll surely bruise, but it hurts less and less. He’s been looking for the right words to compose a plausible enough excuse for it, in case anyone goes asking. He hopes not. Izumi already looks at him like he's a dying puppy at the side of a road.On the other hand — and there’s a darn good joke to be made here — now might be the perfect time to start using both gloves, because if supermarkets get to start selling Christmas decor in October, he sure as hell gets to use full-on winter attire at the same time, and that’s final.  
  
He looks beside him to where his discarded bag lies, some pens have spilled out from the manner in which he tossed it on his way in. Namely, with little care and in a fucking rush. The very corner of the book Mustang — no, _Falman_ gave him barely peeks out. Something in his chest does a backflip before falling down to his stomach. Weird. He didn’t know he felt that way about Marx. 

  
After a few seconds of internal hesitance, he still has the urge to sort of look around him, like in case his empty room isn’t, in reality, empty, and Greg’s perched at his window again, tutting with disapproval at how he goes for it and turns the cover with little shame towards educating himself in the ways of utopian socialism.  
  
Something about the whole thing still feels — not wrong, per se but off. The tiny note that slides out of the first page and into his lap seems to be a good-enough indicator that his hunch was indeed correct.

His heart drops for a moment. It squeezes inside his chest. 

There it is — he probably should have known that the whole thing was meant to be taken as a joke. That his little labour-speech performance was transformed into a running gag amongst the class.  
  
That they just wanted to test the theory, to see if orphanages really… If orphanages….  
  
What a fucking idiot.  
  
He closes his eyes for a minute. He doesn’t want to see. It doesn’t feel good.  
  
It’s like that time in middle school some jackass from math jammed his finger at him and asked if he’d ever even known his parents, or if he was simply left in a cardboard box on someone's doorsteps, like out of whatever pop-culture reference that’d been fresh in his mind. Tossed away like trash. He asked if that’s why he ate so fast, because where he came from — the slums of the basest dirt, the lowest of the low, the scum of the earth — your food was rationed.

It wasn’t, really. The habit just stuck with him because some of the medicine they only gave him after a meal, not a second before, and then they’d wait until his stomach settled and no nausea was reported to feed him his much-awaited dessert. By then he was jerky with pain and anticipation, biting his fingers to suppress the growing urge to verbalize his discomfort. To moan. To cry. 

That's when he learned he didn't do meals at the cafeteria.   
  
Some people are just like that when it comes to stigma, though, he thinks while looking down at the mysterious note. They use it as their seeing glasses, their all-around perception points, their only source of knowledge. It happens. He gets it. But it doesn’t feel good. And he hates that he goes around making himself such an easy target.

The cardstock little rectangle on his lap is undeniable proof, except when he lifts it to find a civil apology written with a nice blue pen, he pauses.  
  
He reads it once. Then again. Then re-reads it a couple of more times.  
  
Then once more, for good measure.  
  
“ _Sorry again, about the door incident,_ ” it reads. “ _I hope it doesn’t hurt anymore. Roy._ ”  
  
Ed gingerly puts it down beside him, face up. He stares at the wall in front of him for a while longer, then gets to reading.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so apparently the 21st is the world-renowned fanfic writer appreciation day, which really only serves to reinstate how essential and amazing explicit feedback is to this whole writing deal; ty for all the amazing interactions and encouragement I've received so far. I hope this chapter — which was heavily influenced by having a certain not-to-be-named fleetwood mac composition stuck to my brain for about 48 hours straight — has been to your liking.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello-o0-o-O, this weeks cw's are basically some good old-fashioned social anxiety and awkwardly developing circumstances. Wholesome stuff. Do enjoy!

“… One of those weird fish at the bottom of the ocean, like — you know the ones? They live for hundreds of years, they have this glow in the dark dick and they survive by eating rocks?” Havoc gestures with one hand while leaned back on the gymnasium bleachers.

Ed walks in on a turbulent time, he’s sure. 

The midweek assembly that never really happens “midweek” and no one really knows the purpose of is gathering an increasingly intimidating mass of people around the basketball court. He wishes he didn’t always get this jittery over a potential interaction with people his own damn age, but it’s an instinctual reaction, nothing he can ever wish to unlearn. 

He briefly looks around before slumping down on what seems to be the only space available, a level down from where Havoc and the rest of the football gang are trying to remember the name of what he’s pretty sure is an anglerfish. Two precise taps fall on his shoulder and he’s glad he suppressed the flinch in favor of turning to see Falman, leaning towards him with a friendly smile on his face. 

“Hey, Ed,” he greets. 

Sometimes he forgets what an odd group of friends the one sitting behind him is — what with a natural-born AV club leader, a chain smoking athlete, a mostly cynical two-time State chess champion who’s always chewing on something, a self-taught sniper that’s probably come closer to killing him that he’d like to admit, and this here endless vortex of assorted knowledge. 

“Oh, hey.” Ed smiles back at him. 

“So did you get the volume? Roy said he’d hand it to you,” he says. 

Ed nods. “Yeah, for sure. Thanks a lot, by the way, it looks pretty interesting.” Which is his washed down way of saying ‘I stayed up until four in the morning today because it’s so loaded with information and yet written in such clear terms that it’s no wonder these two made humanity’s most prized philosophical rock stars — also, I kept jolting awake every time I dozed off and heard the ever-so-distinct noise of distant floorboards cracking at the end of the hall. The sound of near-death experiences.’ 

Scratch that. He hopes the tone reflects his gratitude. 

“Have you gotten a chance to read it yet?” Now’s his time to shine. 

“Oh boy, yeah…” he starts, and the way Falman perks at that gives him all the determination needed to come out of his landlocked shell of social isolation and turn sideways to face him better; it feels good. 

“So I really dug this classification on how they conceive all types of societal organizations, from tribal to feudal, and then classical…, Like it’s really interesting to think all their mechanisms of production have always included some level of class oppression and authority asymmetries, or how accumulation seems to be so closely linked to exploitation in all those cases — Even if the words to place it weren’t around yet — philosophically, or. I don’t know…” When he looks up, Falman is nodding vigorously with his elbows on his knees, as a means to lean in closer. 

“I — wow, of course! Yes. I knew you’d find it engaging, but — Does that mean you’re all the way up to the ‘Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy’ part?” he says, not bothering to hide his astonished curiosity. 

The very least Ed can do is whip up his most timid smile, the one he uses when telling people at the shop that the register just ran out of change. He nods. 

“That really rolls off the tongue,” he says, Falman chuckles. “But, but yeah, I’m — I’m a fast reader. I guess.” It’s only half a lie. He ended up passing out with the open volume weighing down on his face, after hours of successful distraction and getting through most of the sentences without his vision going blurry with tears — or, ambient interference… Dust, most likely. 

Falman scoffs, 

“I’d say! I didn’t think I’d be needing to lend you the next one so soon! — But hey, by all means, enjoy. It’s been a while since I could talk to someone who didn’t just go through Cliffs Notes to be conversational.” 

Ed grins a little, because he could never. 

The noise around them gradually begins to die down at the sound of a microphone being checked in center stage, and when Ed turns to face Falman again, his eyes are drawn past him at where Havoc is gesturing for someone to come over. Mustang appears out of the corner of his eye, and he looks a bit disheveled — just a tiny, ‘justifiably-late’ bit — as he playfully swings his backpack off his shoulder and tosses it at Havoc, who swiftly catches it with both hands and sets it aside while suppressing laughter. 

“Dick,” he says while extending his palm to clasp it against Roy’s right one before he drops down beside him with a sigh — and who the fuck knew sighing could be stylish. 

“Alright, alright, settle down, everyone,” comes a voice from below. 

“Hey, so technically you’d need to continue with volume three, but volumes 7 to 9 are a comprisal of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung,” Vato says with what Ed can only assume is an on-point pronunciation, which — damn, “Which was this communist newspaper published during the climax of the 1848 revolutions…” 

Once Roy settles, his eyes dart towards Falman, and then, as an obvious second stop, they land on him. “… It’s pretty awesome because it’s one of the first recorded attempts at an organized revolt from many German states…” Roy cocks his head in his direction, once. “…against authoritarianism, to be replaced with constitutional, representative forms of government.” Ed thinks he smiles back, because it’s better than trying to exactly mimic every single move the other makes.

“So it’s a pretty interesting look into public opinion, in times of republican revolts against authoritative European monarchies,” Falman concludes, Ed nods along, and Mustang enters the conversation with a, 

“What part is that, again?” he says without shifting in his seat, not one centimeter. Well, fuck, if Ed had a voice like that he’d trust it to do his biddings at a distance and in the middle of an overcrowded room, too. 

“Oh, it’s just one of the upcoming books in the collection,” he chirps enthusiastically. 

“Ah.” Roy nods noncommittally. 

But Ed remembers the sections he underlined, the ones related to organized dissent expressed through mechanisms of government overtaking, dissolving, dismantling; the effective formation of worker-based political parties with the people’s interests at heart and the conformation of a strong, democratically-elected state. 

He remembers the soon familiar presence of pencil on paper abruptly disappearing before that specific chapter ended, and Ed had felt like he’d hit a wall.

“I can, um.” It starts before he can clamp his mouth. 

“Okay!” the voice downstairs begins. “The first matter of ordainment is to let you all know about the official implementation of Meatless Monday, people!” There’s a unanimous groan of discontent that ripples through the mass like a wave in a stadium. 

But Roy is still looking at him, mild anticipation playing on his features with just a hint of amusement at his aborted sentence. Smug bastard. Ed looks over at Falman to see him already immersed in the controversies of taking meat away from the cafeteria’s menu once a week, he doesn’t seem against it, but he's also not coming to Ed's aid any time soon. 

His hand suddenly twinges, the wince is inevitable.

“I can…” He starts again, “Like, lend it to you. If you want. I mean I’m almost finished. So.” 

A moment passes. Longer that it should be. 

Incomprehensible. 

“If it’s alright with you,” he finally says, in a moderately hopeful tenor. Ed thinks of the note, he feels as though it lays heavy in the air between them — unsaid, as the innocuous piece of paper that they’re the only two people in the entire world to know about.

Ed nods. At some point, his left hand curled into a fist by his side. His metacarpal bone burns a little; it gives him a friendly reminder of Dante’s grimy chair and he turns his face back to the small group of people gathered under the basketball hoop, digging his teeth onto his inner lip’s flesh. 

*

11:30 am 

The line rings exactly once before Al’s charming voice reaches out to him through the barrier of state lines. When he immediately asks where the hell he’d been these past few days, Ed realizes he hadn’t thought of coming up with a plausible excuse for his absence — or his not answering Al’s texts and calls, either. 

He can’t come out and say he’d been too afraid that he’d cry if he heard his voice — so hard that he’d drown them both in under two minutes— and then everything would come crashing down. But there’s a reason for all of it, and he can’t back down now. He has a masterplan, dammit. 

“My phone fell. Into the toilet,” he says. “It died.” 

“Oh…,” Al breathes, taken aback. “Oh, shit.”

“ _Language…_ ” Ed mutters the reprimand. 

“Oh, let me swear already, Ed! You speak like a sixteenth-century sailor yourself; you’re a profanity rolodex.” 

Ed presses the corners of his mouth in an attempt to suppress his stupid-happy-because-I’m-talking-to-my-brother-smile as he alternates between that and stammering through his sentence, “Yeah, well — yeah, but I don’t want that future for you. It’s — it’s a rough lifestyle.” He hears Al snort. Sweet, beautiful, amazing Al. 

“Just shut up, it doesn’t sound good when you say it, okay? There. Someone had to tell you.”

“You wound me, brother.” Al sighs. 

“It’s for your own good.” 

“You’re such a baby.”

“You know it.”

Ed chances a look behind him, the halls are mostly empty on his way out onto the little patch of grass by the west exit, where some kids use their free periods to light up and he uses his fake bathroom breaks to call Al when he doesn’t get a chance to do so earlier— the wide range use of the space is due to the fact that no staff or faculty ever come here, like they’re afraid it’s haunted with the spirit of too much pubescent turmoil. It’s been raining; the wet grass greets him with a pleasant smell. 

“Well I’m glad you’re okay, though,” he says, and Ed does a very, very good job at keeping his throat from clamping up. “The trash-mouth tyrant lives.” 

It’s Ed’s turn to snort. Al giggles. 

“He fucking does.” 

*

There’s always this point previous to when the substance hits, which isn’t a very extended period of time, really, but it’s prominent for completely different reasons. After the first inhale, his nostrils tingle with the powder’s sharp transit, and he knows it isn’t even physically possible for it to have taken effect already, yet not a split second after, he feels it. 

Anticipation for the inevitable. The warm reassurance of the act itself. 

Back at the hospital, it had been the faint twinge of a hypodermic needle, inching its way into his basilic vein. A few weeks in and the puncture itself had become almost as good as the real thing. 

Almost. For once his spinal cord gets the message and starts finally — _finally_ — relaxing, bit by bit, and he can practically hear his brainstem begin to uncoil from the death grip it’s got in itself and the music starts, he knows there’s nothing in the world quite like it. It’s this exact sweet spot that had him salivating at the sound of medical cart wheels squeaking their way over to his bed like a pavlovian reaction for months back then. 

He unrolls the five dollar bill on his hand, gives it a couple of straightening strokes and tucks it back into his wallet. 

It’s just his hand that’s giving him trouble today. The knee is down to its usual buzz of that annoying little burn he can usually ignore. He calculates he’ll only be needing assistance until the week is over — Sunday, that is. No longer. Then he should be able to just put the pills away. Or re-sell them. Or return them to their rightful owner, or something. 

He’ll think of something. 

*

The only reason he can walk back into the house that evening is because it feels like he’s being pulled into it by a certain white-cover, hard-back collection of papers with black little Times New Roman letters slapped into them that’s stashed deep in one of his lower drawers inside a closet. 

It’s almost like he’s afraid it’s going somewhere. 

He hopes Mustang’s writing doesn’t magically peel off, because he wouldn’t be that surprised to find out they’d walked out after seeing him sit on the floor of his room for hours on end while muttering to himself. Rocking back and forth. Holding his hand against his chest. 

When he bursts into his room and opens the marked page, though, they’re still there. 

Some odd margins decorated with the rub of graphite, the words themselves, transparent, curious, unashamed of their conception; same as the ones jotted down on the note, they know that after their drawing, they’re for him, for his eyes only. 

_“Sorry again, about the door incident. I hope it doesn’t hurt anymore. Roy.”_

They look at him. They prove their existence through the fact that he hasn’t the slightest idea of what he’s supposed to do with them. 

_I hope it doesn’t hurt anymore._

Ed takes an unsteady inhale — he and Roy both. 

*

8:47 am 

He’s gotta stop lingering so much in his locker and figure out a new, secret place in which to stash his books and folders and the crumpled pieces of paper he’s been meaning to clear out for months now. 

“Long time no see,” Greg grins around a chewed lollipop stick as he slumps against the locker beside him. 

Ed barely manages not to jump at the sudden entrance, it’s like an apparition to see Greg on school premises these days. A bad omen. 

“Man, I was _wondering_ what it was,” Ed replies with a whiff of comprehension. Greg scoffs. 

“Aw, c’mon, I know this dump misses having a little life injected into it.” He reeks of an ashtray that someone poured a little rum into to have the butts extinguish faster. One of his usual earlobe pieces seems to be missing and maybe there’s a smudge of eyeliner cradling his eyes. 

When in doubt, nothing beats simply rolling one’s head to feign understanding. “Sure does.”

“So I take it you received my gift? You seem a lot less tense.” A coy smile. A very, very punchable face. “What? It’s a good look on you — not combusting with stress and all that. It does wonders for the skin, I’ve heard,” he teases. 

“I don’t comb—” He remembers who he’s talking to, a few steadying inhales of resignation might do the trick. “Yeah, okay, Greg.” 

What’s weird about Greg as a person, or rather as a concept, if you will, is that he triumphs in Ed’s mind as an extremely nice and amicable being for all of the same reasons that, when actually interacting with him in practice, make him the most insufferable jackass to have ever lived. He’s just too much. 

And only theoretical ‘too much’ is tolerable. 

“Ah…, Elric.” He sighs in faux contemplation while waving past him before suddenly dropping his voice a notch and sliding closer, “Anyway — listen. Real talk? I’m gonna ask you to hold on to those. As in, inside your stomach, if that’s what you want.” He chuckles, “But just your stomach, if you get my drift.” 

“I … Okay…” He hadn’t thought about the very distinct possibility that Greg might still be high on something, after what seems like the tragic result of a long night of playing Party Monster on the streets of this murky-ass, run-down town. 

“You haven’t by any chance… Like, told anyone, or shared, have you?” He’s never this discreet, and so Ed shakes his head with some apprehension… To which Greg responds with an unrestrained breath of relief. “Oof, great.” He smiles. “A’ight… Good. See?” A loose palm clasps against his back.

“I knew I could trust you. Lonely users are the _best!_ ” he grunts in approval — and perhaps a bit too loudly, kind of like proclaiming his love at the top of the Himalaya. 

Ed doesn’t know that that last jab was _completely_ necessary, he suppresses the grimace and goes for a tight-lipped smile. “Yup, that’s… That’s me,” he says while taking his monstrosity of a biology textbook and slumping it into the small, cold little box in front of him. 

He wouldn’t call himself a ‘user’, though. Not in any way, shape or form. But having a terminology fight is just one of those things you gotta be willing to go to war over — and he knows that, in this case, the looks of it aren’t backing him up. 

For now, though, it’s enough that he knows it. 

Not a user. 

“Take it as a compliment man. Times like these… It’s good to know there’s people I can trust. Gotta keep myself squeaky clean, especially after Dolcetto.”

“What about Dolcetto,” he says conversationally, waiting for yet another batshit story about random animal attacks with a moral about friends and loyalty at the end. Honestly, he should know better than to ask at this point. 

“Oh you didn’t hear? He got picked up the other day — Yeah! Crazy shit, right? Real fuckin bummer. He’s got his hearing next week,” he says while lifting his hand to wave at another friendly bypasser that Ed doesn’t bother turning to look at because he's busy peeling his eyes at him while a layer of dreadful frost takes over his body. 

“Let’s just hope he doesn’t pick up hepatitis when they make him go under the bridges to sweep them used syringes, huh?” He elbows Ed, who barely manages to do anything other than stand dumbfounded with shock and stare at Greg with pause. He cocks an eyebrow. “You know…, because of the community service?” Greg drawls, as if trying to help his friend in on a joke he really shouldn’t be wasting time making. 

Understanding immediately dawns on him, but a healthy, reasonable level of concern is still due for an appearance which Ed hopes is…, Not too far away. 

“Oh — Oh dude, it’s got nothing to do with the other night — if that’s what you’re thinking. Rest assured. She didn’t see us, there’s just no way!” 

Ed wants to punch his locker into the wall behind it but either hand would react badly to the blow. Besides, he doesn’t really take himself to be That type of guy. The pent up frustration is rather expressed in him jerkily looking back and forth, as if searching for Greg’s very last shred of sanity and self-preservation, just in case he dropped it somewhere on the hall’s floor.

“Oh my fucking God. Oh fuck, wh — How could you even know —” he starts, trying to keep his volume to a bare minimum. 

“My plates are untraceable, I change ‘em every month,” he interrupts like he’s a heist genius. 

“Yeah but they’re stupid shit only you would think of putting on a damn car.” Hysteria bubbles up in him like a tossed bottle of sparkling water. “Shit.”

DIY ski masks. His unfortunate ass in the passenger’s seat of that particular shitshow and a midnight joke he didn’t get the punchline of. Riza and her 21/21 eyesight. 

He knew it — he _knew_ it. 

“They’re not! A lotta people personalize their stuff, it’s all a part of making the DMV experience even just a little exciting —”

If there’s ever a time for assertive hand gestures, it’s now. He turns with his palm extended towards Greg like he’s part of the logistics team for a middle-school Winter Formal but the kids are smuggling vodka in though Gatorade bottles and slipping it in the fruit punch and he’s actually just a homeroom teacher who doesn’t get paid enough for this kind of stress, because this entire situation is one of the lower rings of hell. 

He’s like a pageant mom who is two seconds away from losing her shit — from going tonic-clonic on an eight-year-old with hair extensions. 

“Okay, Greg? I distinctly remember you using the letters ‘OMW2BYB’ not so long ago — you’re the only person in this entire fuckin’ county who drives a red nineties Nissan with _stupid fucking plates!_ ” he hisses — and hates that Greg looks genuinely taken aback by his less-than-constructive criticism; but not as much as he hates how well he remembers that particular license plate and it’s text version of ‘On My Way 2 Bang Your Bitch’, which had made Greg crack up so hard when he told him that Ed genuinely thought he was gonna pull a lung.

Greg puts his hands in the air, “Okay! Okay, sheesh. See, this is exactly why I’m taking my precautions! Getting rid of the merchandise for now… You don’t have to be so rude.” He huffs. 

He doesn’t know when, but his bare hand shot up to squeeze the bridge of his nose like it belongs there, stuck to his face. 

“ _Precautions?_ I’m— ” The outburst is clipped short by their closeness to a teacher walking past them. When she disappears out of Ed’s peripheral vision, he directs his wrath back at his ass of an obliged brother. “Listen to me, Greg, just because you have a fucking death wish does not mean I wanna jump right in with you on this batshit rollercoaster of fuckin’ doom and unnecessarily bad decisions you call a life —” He jams his finger into Greg’s chest, which is hitching through unrestrained chuckles. “— Hey — No! Don’t laugh, this isn’t fucking _funny_ , asshole —”

“Yo I’m sorry,” he starts, looking at Ed like he’s the unhinged one. “I think you just gave me my next plate name— if only ‘rollercoaster of doom’ wasn’t so long — Ah, Doom Patrol’s already taken. Doom wagon?” He snaps his fingers at him “— _Doom platoon,_ ” he chokes. "I gotta take the vocals out, though, won't be as funny." He goes on. 

It’s all Ed can do not to bang his head against the locker with the longest groan ever mustered, coming straight out of his very soul. 

“Run me over,” he mutters, mostly to himself. Cool aluminum rests against the back of his hand, settled between his forehead and the hard material. 

It’s really too fucking bad that he doesn’t think to stop — just stop! — and reflect — collaborate! (with himself) and listen! — when it matters most. Namely, when a bundle of pharma-regulated opioids simply fall into his lap and his first instinct is to get on his knees and eat them off the floor like a starved animal because Greg didn’t even bother getting them into a damn ziploc. 

Maybe another version of him would’ve had the volition to put a little more strength in his resistance, but that ideal Ed — morally superior, standing his ground, thorough in his denial — didn’t start the week off through the shit end of the stick. 

That Edward didn’t have a probably fractured phalange and two lungs filled with itching chemicals. 

He would have licked the powder clean of Greg’s fingers, had it come to that.

“You’re doing me a solid, though, for reals,” Greg tries. “I gotta keep a low profile, so…”

Ed groans, then pushes himself away from where he’s been mournfully leaning against the locker like that’ll accomplish anything and takes a sharp breath. “Fuck you.” He slaps the locker door closed. 

It’s too early for this. 

“Hey, look, the way I see it, this arrangement is mutually beneficial.” His smile doesn’t fade, — even if Ed isn’t looking at him in favour of jamming his fingers into his eye sockets again while walking himself to class — he can hear the way his voice leaves an eternally quirked mouth. “You can’t _seriously_ be this angry with me,” Greg falls into a casual stride next to him. 

And isn’t that just the biggest misfortune ever bestowed upon him? — that Greg is mostly right. 

“By the way,” The absolute wrench that’s gonna get him into juvie for participating in the robbery of about $70 worth of assorted junk food and really crappy booze faster than he can blink keeps talking, “I heard about that thing with Evie,” 

His eyes dart towards the end of the hall — a folded corner that leads to room 203, in which Mr. Kimblee gets his four weekly hours as undisputed King of the pandemonium of his own making, so it’s more or less to be expected that Mustang also materializes from his left, walking with a hand in his pocket and a healthy dose of boredom painted in his eyes. 

“That’s some bullshit, man, I’m real sorry about it,” Greg keeps blabbering, “But you can’t say I haven’t warned you — you should seriously get the fuck outta there before she snaps your neck one of these days —”

“ _Okay_ — okay. Yeah.” Ed rushes while attempting to convey that this conversation has reached its official end. He’s apparently forgotten that Greg isn’t one to catch onto the subtleties of physical language, though. 

Roy is right behind them as they take to the right. 

“I’m dead serious my guy, I think her grandad was part of the Manson family, and then she _also_ grew up in a literal cult where everyone fucked with each other and did PCP, that’s why she’s like th—”

“Okay, Greg! See ya.” He goes for a mild shove — just enough to get his point across. The steps behind him are getting deafening. Greg finally takes the hint and falls back with both hands in the air,

“Just a fair warning!” He winks while retreating.

Ed cannot for the life of him contain the migraine-causing eye roll that follows — same as he can’t help it when his gaze turns to where Roy keeps walking towards him, looking past his shoulder at the trainwreck that is his foster sibling as he stretches his arms and disappears down the hall. 

When he fixes his eyes back on Ed, there’s a little smile threatening to grow at the corners of his mouth. 

He arches his eyebrows. 

“Some animosity?” he inquires without stopping, so Ed also gets a move on.

“It’s well deserved,” he huffs while adjusting the strap on his shoulder and turning back towards the classroom’s direction. They fall into a parallel rhythm, and he’s thankfully still high on his indignant anger to think anything of it. 

Mustang snickers. “I’ll take your word for it.” 

“Best decision, really,” he immediately answers, and gives himself some pause at the confidence in his voice — being annoyed really does it for him, then. Mustang doesn’t seem fazed by it, and instead keeps his casual demeanor. 

“It’s Luisa’s brother, right?” he asks. 

Ed hums, “Twins.” 

“Really?” Mustang muses, Ed goes out on a limb and assumes he’s looking at him, so he nods. “… Huh,”

“Yeah, I don’t see it either,” he says, still keeping his eyes straight ahead. There’s no further comment on the living situation that makes him privy to this knowledge, and for that he takes a small breath of relief. 

Roy huffs a little laughter, small and unsuspecting. A light sound that travels through the air with ease and that he wouldn’t have caught on to were it not for their current physical proximity. The reminder of Luisa only serves to amplify the fact that he has none of her poise and mysterious aura. He doesn’t have her perfect skin or intriguing voice or elegant fucking hand gestures. 

They’re just a few steps shy from arriving at the classroom door when the reminder hits Ed like a wall. The book. The one he read straight through last night in hopes of sharing it again. He looks up at Mustang and turns, making the most out of the energy given to him by this sudden pang of realization. 

“Oh — by the way, I um, I finished this yesterday,” he says while opening his bag, Mustang stops in front of him. “I just didn’t get through the last chapter but they’re not like, narratively linked to each other so I figured I can get back to it whenever,” he says while handing it out.

“Ah, perfect.” Mustang’s smile immediately broadens, unclouded and so direct Ed feels like he’s being attacked with an interrogation-room lamp, “I was just about to ask you about it, actually.” He says after swiftly taking his hand out of his pocket and gripping the offered book. 

At that, Ed doesn’t bother with not looking impressed. 

“Pretty eager,” Ed can’t help but denoting through a mumble, only seconds later regretting it and kicking himself in the fucking teeth. Mustang’s smile doesn’t seem affected by his snark, though — which somehow both relieves and bothers him at the same time. 

“Oh, to deconstruct the educational prejudices of our western society’s cultural indoctrination?” He says while looking down at the title. “Eager is the word.” 

“Damn.” Ed worries, which keeps a smirk firmly planted on Roy’s face. 

“Don’t tell me you knew about such a thing as the ‘woeful ills of commodity fetishism’ before this,” he says wistfully while moving towards the entrance. 

Ed snorts, because of course he didn’t. “Nor did I about labour alienation — which is an enhanced way of saying ‘Hey, factory workers are hella depressed’,”

Roy hums, “I believe that.” 

Kimblee hasn’t arrived, which is unusual, but a fucking relief nonetheless. He’d been absentmindedly bracing himself for that trademark nasty scrutinizing gaze that always makes him feel like a dissected frog, on a cold tray with his shameful guts spilled out for everyone to see. His breath always stuck to his windpipe and he glued his eyes to the floor all the way over to his seat, never quite able to block out the feeling of Kimblee’s glare painfully poking at his side with all shades of disgust, mockery, absolute disdain for his unrefined ass. 

He doesn’t get that his fists were clenched at his sides until he realizes he’ll be able to walk through the classroom without being looked at, and something about that gives him a near overwhelming need to smile, but he doesn’t. 

It’s only when Roy doesn’t move towards the back in favour of sitting at the very first row and gracefully lets the book down on the seat’s surface, that trepidation gets back at him with full force. 

Roy extends his right hand and places his spread fingers to turn the volume around in one swift, deathly motion, which makes the title evident when standing at the front. He pushes it slightly forward with a hint of mischief, plain to see. Waiting. 

Oh, this class is just the gift that keeps on giving. 

The tangy taste of metal fills his mouth, he tongues through his inner lip and involuntarily bites down on it again as he gingerly walks towards his own seat, not before stopping near Roy — close enough to mutter amidst clenched teeth and a growing sense of urgency,

“What are you doing.” 

Roy looks up as if genuinely aloof. 

“Thought a little change might be nice.” Another smile that looks too easy. 

He can’t really be bothered to feel that impressed, though. All in all, this might actually be his last day of life. 

“Uh-huh,” he nods along, unbelieving, while looking past Roy at the slow gathering in the classroom. At all of those who already know who he is — all of those who will likely never forget his name. 

Foster kid student. Low-bred Ed. 

They remember with unforgiving detail, yes, even if there _ is _ another kid at the back there who once commented on how 'the confederate flag isn’t inherently linked to any racist values' while Kimblee indulged him. His is not the life at stake here. 

“You know,” he lifts a finger in the air for the desired effect of a terrible foreboding, which is, you know, accurate, “This is _exactly_ how my nightmare starts.” 

Roy’s tone is a mixture of light mockery and genuine concern. “You dream of this class?” 

He squints. “Uhh,” he draws out while looking down at his unsuspecting social assassin of a classmate. If there was ever a day in which he’d be required by circumstance to dispense with all of his most sardonic facial expressions, it was today. “No?” he says to him. 

“And I appear in these dreams,” Mustang prods, musing while he extends both palms in front of him, intertwining his fingers on the book’s cover. Ed flicks his gaze over it with growing disquiet. 

“Yeah well, so does Dwight D. Eisenhower on rollerskates, so,” he answers while dropping himself onto his seat, biting his tongue to halt the swift remark of some other dreamy motifs that may or may not be present whenever a Kimblee-related nightmare hijacks his brain. His subconscious provides him with a lot of fucked up shit. He’s probably said enough. 

“That…, sounds positively terrifying,” Roy drawls, still having the decency to not look directly at him while Ed hastily goes for his notebook and slaps it on his desk; any moment now, Kimblee’ll waltz in and an actual dagger will materialize from his deadly gaze. It’ll burst his head like a melon after he sees the top of Roy’s writing chair. His cruel tongue will snake out of his mouth and coil around his neck and snap it in half. 

“Yeah —” he continues, scooting a little forward on his chair, “on the other hand, I get a lotta valuable information from the cryptic symbolism in my dreams —”

“— Is he wearing his military uniform? Oh, are the skates camouflage, too, or do you not get that amount of detail?” Ed looks nervously at the door, before focusing back on the ridiculously evident book on Mustang’s desk. 

“— _Such as_ , the fact that we’re gonna get our asses handed to us if you don’t put that away,” he finishes with a hiss. 

This isn’t going to end well. 

“Really? Is that what your vision tells you?” the asshole goes on. Monumentally unaffected. 

“ _Yes_ , alright — just — c’mon, put it away.” It won’t be funny. Spit is sticking to his windpipe. Any moment now. 

“Why? I’m allowed to indulge in any subject of my choosing, aren’t I?” He keeps that stupid grin on his face and it’s still too relaxed, because there’s probably no room in his life for actual worry. 

He doesn’t have a fucked up body. He doesn’t have a runny mouth. He’s not an ugly, stupid, unstudied, unworldly, rural-belonging headcase —

“Last I checked, Mr. Kimblee doesn’t get a say in what I do with my free time, or what ghosts from the past I choose to commune with.” 

“ _Roy_ —” The name rushes past his lips with such vehemence that he chokes on his own spit and stares at the air between them, wanting with every fiber of his being to reel the word back into the safety of his dry throat. Those three little damned letters, dragging him along with the sound of his own voice — broken, unrecognizable. 

Pleading. 

Mustang’s own playful smile transforms into a solemn neutrality within seconds, he blinks a couple of times while Ed feels the world collapse onto him. He leans back into the window behind him at that… 

There’s something almost soft about the way Mustang looks at him; for the first time, Ed sees a resemblance of hesitance manifest on his features. 

He swallows. 

“Just…, Please.” The last word is nothing beyond a pathetic little whisper as he drops his gaze down to inspect the patterns on the carpet beneath them. Jesus. 

After another one of those eternal moments, until Mustang takes a short, unstable breath in and says,

“Okay… I — Yeah. Of course,” he breathes, moving to put the book away, all because Ed can’t participate in the making of a silly practical joke. 

He can’t laugh at it from the sidelines, either, or even attempt to be chill about it. Now might also be the best time for Mustang to realize that. He isn’t built for casual interactions. He can’t manage it. He’s no fucking fun. 

He tries not to think anything of the fact that Mustang doesn’t make any move to transfer himself back to his usual place, but rather stays there, slightly in front of him and to the right. 

When Kimblee walks in with his usual wide-legged march and uninterested greeting, Ed instinctively bows his head down to stare at his hands; he hopes Mustang doesn’t notice. 

It dawns on him as a few minutes pass, that this is officially the first time he’s ever referred to him by his first name. He doesn’t even know if that’s something his actual friends do, if that’s normal, if that’s okay. He can’t bring himself to look over at him, no matter how much his body urges him to. He can’t. 

His bruised left hand trembles and burns as he tries to write. 

*

The next time they see each other, it’s at the exact moment in which he thought — albeit kind of stupidly — he could finally catch a break. 

“Man, that shit was depressing,” he says to Winry while tipping the slim carton over his mouth to get the last pieces of popcorn as they walk out of the theatre. 

“What the hell — depressing?” she questions him while snatching it for herself and diving her fingers into the residue. “That was straight-up terrifying, Ed,” she says while chewing. “I mean it’s a horror movie, c’mon.” 

The sky’s dark, and the climate around them marginally colder than when they first came in, about two hours ago — like thirty minutes early because she’d insisted on not letting the long queues to get assorted candy ruin her fun. 

She scoffs and he’s genuinely surprised to see the air in front of her condense in white for a second — that little ghost that materializes out of freezing air. Something tightens brightly in his chest for a second at the thought of changing tides. December is, finally, just around the corner. That means winter break, means a greyhound bus ticket, means seeing Al. 

_Al._

“Depressing…” she mutters while shaking her head and shoving some more pop-corn into her downcast mouth. “I’m not sleeping tonight.” 

Ed takes the hands he’s been rubbing together — mildly out of being cold, but more as an absentminded gesture, a habit born out of wanting to keep the aching temperature at bay, — and crosses his arms, tucking them under his armpits. 

He grins at her, “Wanna go watch The Exorcist at your place?”

She’s staring off into space and takes a few seconds to tongue the insides of her cheek before flicking her gaze towards him and rolling her eyes. “I mean, hell yeah,” she says, “But like — just gimme a second, ‘cause… Oof.” 

Ed chuckles while moving to stand in front of her. “Just think about it, though, it _was_ kinda sad. I mean it all went down because they’re a dysfunctional ass family —”

“The grandma _sold_ them to her cult! I’m — I… ” She throws her hands in the air in frustrated defeat while shaking her head more vehemently, to which Ed starts laughing in earnest. 

“See? That’s dramatic. Drama means sad.” He’s feeling giddy with how okay everything has gone. 

It’s Friday. He took the last of his prescription a few hours ago and his chest no longer hurts so much. Granny made good on her stew promise and Winry proposed going to the movies straight after. He found it in himself to want to say yes, to feel _excited_ about it. 

He tries to make up for all the fun he’s making her miss out on by not going out with a larger group or with her other friends; he’s happy to think that he’s succeeded at that, at least, by accompanying the film with his custom trail mix of stupid commentary and having her near-snort her iced tea out on more than one occasion, as well as chuckling nervously after they both flinched at the exact same scene. 

The crystal doors fly open, not for the first time since they’ve come out, but it has been the only instance in which Ed’s head turns after recognizing something from out of the corner of his eye. 

Heymans Breda crushes an empty wrapper between both hands and attempts to distance dunk it in the trash can a few feet away from him. He misses and curses under his breath while sheepishly jogging to retrieve it from the ground. Havoc’s voice fills the air with a disquieted moan.

“What the ever-loving _fuck_ , Mustang, why’d we have to pick that one?” he says while rubbing his face raw. “Sweet baby fucking _Jesus._ ”

Ed’s chest bursts and contracts all at the same time at the mention of his name, suddenly too aware of his surroundings, the trepidation of the outside world. No nagging bells, no study halls, no lockers, no daylight. 

Roy emerges close behind Havoc with his fingers intertwined and placed atop his head, his torso stretches upwards and there’s the tiniest opening between the belt loops of his faded jeans and the lower hem of his T-shirt where he can see part of his skin, part of a hipbone… He promptly looks away as all-encompassing jitters hijack his arms and his shoulders hunch forward just a tad. 

“I’ll make sure to hold your hand next time,” he says with a confident grin, patting Havoc’s shoulder once as he sniffles around the unlit cigarette he just lipped out of its packet. Things seem to fall into a lethargic rhythm as his eyes land on Ed, and it’s like a practiced motion, something he’d come to expect. 

Ed wants to both walk towards the group and recoil from them, run away. Hide. Instead, he’s simply standing there, out in the open with crumbs falling from the dark cotton sweater he got at Goodwill last year.

There’s bright blue and purple filling the space around them, the ambiance of neon lighting that frames the movie posters in the walls adjacent to both their paused bodies. It cradles the side of Roy’s face as he moves to speak, 

“You don’t seem too scared,” he notes. Straight at him. 

And it just takes a moment. He stares, he blinks, he thinks he breathes, until the back of Winry’s hand slaps his right arm — gently, because she knows. She knows and she somehow never forgets, but it’s still strong enough to snap him out of his brain dead moment of contemplation. 

“Y-yeah no, I guess, I just felt bad for ‘em,” he says, vaguely looking over at where Winry keeps innocuously chewing while giving Mustang a good going-over. “The family, I mean, not the sect. Although I guess it must be pretty wack for them, too. Bein’ balls naked like that in the middle of a forest… Tough requirement,” he says before he can think. 

Roy exhales through his nose as his close-mouthed smile expands a little, still, it seems loose and lazier than usual. Suddenly Breda’s voice pitches from behind, 

“Yo, it’s the Hero of the People himself, everyone!” he says while throwing both arms in the air and walking towards him. “We saw you come in, we were at the J row.” 

“The her— the what?” Ed asks quietly, to which Roy rolls his eyes, 

“There’s this popular belief that you might be the first person ever to dare contest Kimblee’s hated reign — Enjoy the acclaim,” he offers. 

He doesn’t get a chance to answer to that ridiculous claim before Breda’s unorganized spewing continues. “Yeah, we were the J-row gang, chilling just a few seats behind you two — and _Edward Elric_ …” he says while taking another few steps until he’s a little too close and pointing a finger at his chest while squinting in conspiratorial menace, “I heard you downright _laugh_ , you know that? That’s deranged because — because shit was spooky, what was so funny about that, ya psycho?” Up this close, Ed can make out the distinct scent of alcohol rolling off his breath. 

“Alright, alright, now.” Roy comes to the rescue by slipping his forearm in front of Breda’s chest, halting his irremediably drunk pal and preventing him from falling into Ed, 

“Sorry about him, apparently someone can’t handle a little rum in their coke,” he says directly at Heymans, who just grumbles something indecipherable as he takes a few stumbling steps back. 

“A _little?_ Your crazy ass dumped the entire flask in his soda!” Havoc jabs at him from where he’s smoking against the opposite wall, beside the trashcan-integrated-ashtray. Roy turns to give him what Ed can only assume is a warning glare, but Havoc only rolls his eyes.

“You’re just as drunk man, you…, ” Heymans hiccups, “You were clapping at Toni Collette’s monologue scene,” 

“That was you?” Ed blurts. 

“Ugh, that was so annoying…” Winry mutters at his side, moving to throw the empty carton away. 

“You’re prolly also one of those people who clap when the plane lands,” Havoc adds from behind.

Ed has to snicker, so, so very badly. 

He tightens his stance and keeps quiet, instead. 

Roy looks at him while tucking his lips into his teeth, after rolling his eyes at Breda, seemingly restraining himself from shoving him to his death into the busy street. He moves to slide both his hands within his pockets and licks his lips after a split second.

Ed notices that, kind of like his cheeks, they’ve acquired a faint pink tint — it’s probably the cold, or the fact that he’s as drunk as his friends’ assessment indicates. His hair is a bit disheveled, the wind lazily plays around with softs strands of jet black and pushes them out of his eyes, which look at him unclouded and direct as ever, but not as wide as he’d remembered them. 

It might be something like an anemic hint of embarrassment, what he’s seeing… Once again, first time for everything. 

“… Great actress,” he offers after a few seconds with an attempt at shrugging, it rather just looks like he's adjusting his stance.

Ed blinks. The frigid air swivels around both of them. 

He presses his lips slightly downward, considering, his eyes dart around the little flies that have gathered below the ticket office’s bright lights. Buzzing. It was a really visceral scene, if he’s being honest with himself, one in which he kind of pressed himself against the plush seating… But all in all, his assessment is correct. 

He nods.

“Yeah…, Yeah,” he concedes in a slightly higher pitch as the doors fly open once again to let a stumbling short-haired girl out, she goes straight for Roy’s arm and latches her own around his back.

Winry comes back from behind him and grabs his elbow, 

“Wanna get going?” she asks.

“Sure,” he smiles at her, albeit more hesitant than he should be. 

“Sorry about that, the line was eternal!” the unknown girl sighs while ginning up at Mustang. “Now take me the hell home; I’m not puking on the street,” she moans while letting her head rest against his side; her brown hair is slightly curled, neatly pulled into a half-tail, her eyes lidded as she sighs through shiny, glossed, plush lips. She’s wearing one of those choker necklaces. Ed bets she’s the type of gal that smells real good. Like one of those people who were just born with an eternally fresh, peachy tang adhered to their skin. 

“You mighta puked straight in his mouth, from how you two were goin’ at each other,” Havoc hollers, and — _damn_ , he’s really getting payback for being coerced into this traumatizing film experience, it seems.

Ed blinks a couple of times more, taking in the scene in front of him, Winry’s hand becomes a bit more insistent.

Both Roy and the girl flick Jean off in unison before he turns back and says, “Sure thing,” without prying his eyes away from Ed’s for a second. 

“See you, Edward,” he then adds, and his name sounds weird, said like that. Like it’s too long. Too many letters. Too many opportunities for ominous inflection. He can’t place the feeling. 

It’s…, Not exactly bad. 

He can only sort of silently nod in return before he and Winry turn on their heels and walk back to her car. They fall into a casual pace for a block. 

“Man,” Winry emits a breathy chuckle as she gets her keys out from her jacket, “So _those_ were the ones who kept making noise. They’re all from your grade, right?” Ed wordlessly nods. 

Silence resumes for a moment, only filled by the sound of their coordinated steps, before she speaks up again, “Is that the jackass who gave you those?” She gestures vaguely at his face, probably having heard about the apocryphal rumor he'd heard from Evie herself. Her tone is somewhat casual, but he hears the strain behind it. The murderous rage. 

He considers the street around them.

It’s semi-busy, there’s a pretty good pizza place around the corner, there’s a couple making out while leaning on a lamp post that’s got chewed gum stuck to its side, there’s drivers cursing at unruly motorcycles in the distance. 

He takes a breath in, “Yeah,” he lets it out. “He is,” he says, all the while keeping his eyes on the passing concrete below his shoes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> On the off chance that anyone should wonder about it, Hereditary is the movie they all saw; and [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uWQVdNKUrk) is the scene Roy got heated over (In this house we stan Collette — a truly stellar performance that got ignored by the academy for reasons unknown).


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hello everyone! I’m so sorry this chapter took so freaking long, a deathly mixture of academic obligations, endless procrastination and my virgo ascendant ass walking into a gruesome trap of pointless perfectionism made it so, but it is finally here and it’s also a long one to make up for the wait, so..., Bone apple tea I guess 🖤

Entire weeks roll around like it’s nobody’s business whether or not they elapse in a fair enough manner. When Roy blinks, it’s already a wretched Thursday and the clock points at noon with mocking accuracy. 

He must’ve been asleep for days, only nothing could be further away from the truth. He was very much awake and busy making himself insufferable for Riza Hawkeye’s temperament, although it’s honestly not a very forgiving one if he’s up for cutting himself some slack. 

“Would you like to come with me to bow practice?” she asks him at the beginning of it, where he’s still desperate yet quite hopelessly prowling through the desolate streets of his fractured mind trying to scrape some of those ‘happy funhouse chemicals’ out of his solidifying brain before they slip through his fingers like thin sand, as they usually end up doing. “You can be my moving target practice,“ she says, “I’ll be able to locate you at a miles distance based off the gigantic cloud over your head.” 

“You can shoot arrows _that_ far?” he limits himself to asking while she dusts her hands on the already dirty front of her washed out jeans.

“And people say I have no range.” She has the pluck to humorlessly wink at him before standing up completely from where she’d been crouching down, on the wet soil of the feeble woods area near the abandoned train tracks. 

They’ve been walking around for the better part of an hour as she periodically stops and cuts off whatever mind-numbingly dejected blabber he was going on in order to stand in silence and listen for the song of whichever robins and dark-eyed juncos have decided to make a nest in the dried out branches of these desolate trees. 

He isn’t surprised to see she’d been prepared for this little bird-watching detour on their way back from school as she knowingly takes out a pair of binoculars from her backpack. He’d say he was ready, too, at least to not take the car out today in favor of the 200 milliliters of sour mash whiskey inside the palm-sized crystal bottle on his hands. He takes another swish and revels in the fact that there’s still more than half to go. 

He admires the way the afternoon sun silently permeates through the tree-tops and illuminates the rich brown liquid as he tilts the bottle upwards. 

He’d smile if it were any other day. That is at least what he tells himself. 

Riza doesn’t seem to mind. Perhaps she’s long since given up on him. He can’t bring himself to mind it at the moment, it’s more of a dull type of pain, washed out and placed at the very back of his perception. 

“Who says that? Let’s beat them up,” he answers and works the alcohol-tainted spit in his mouth. 

There’s a hum, a whisper, a rumor of fizzing complacence steadily taking over his limbs as they make their way through the woods and the next gulp of whiskey burns going down his throat; deliciously rich, all encompassing, a moment of true warmth. 

Riza simply scoffs, a few steps ahead of him. He only sees the back of her denim jacket, ornamented with assorted patches from her archery club — from people in so deep into their sport, they actually dabble into the fine art of custom embroidery. 

He wants to laugh with her. His body seems caged, however, in the fact that it’d take up too much vital energy to even simply quirk his mouth, to provide him with the essential sentiment needed to tip over into the outer world, to let the scattered chunks of wood ingrained in the damp earth beneath his shoes hear his unbothered voice. 

He feels so much affection for the person walking in front of him, he feels it all, and yet none of it seems to be within reach at the moment. 

“You should come, tomorrow,” he tries again, because he never has anything to lose with her — that is, she’d never take from him what he certainly couldn’t bear losing. He drinks while walking with her because it’s safe. He’s always sheltered in the knowledge of her tolerance, if not her complete understanding of why he does what he does. 

Why he walks. Why he drinks. 

Why he drinks while walking. 

Why he’s drinking now. 

On a Monday. 

He sees the back of her head, a blue plastic hair clip that’s definitely her favorite. 

“I should rest,” she answers. “Berthold’s going to need me at the counter Saturday morning — he has a checkup.” 

Roy clamps his throat shut. She had probably said something like that before, and he’d promptly forgotten all about it. He’s seen the man’s blood-tainted napkins. He wants to wish him luck through her, instead he goes for another chug. 

“Oh, that’s right,” he says, hoping he hit the mark, but he’s kidding himself — he doesn’t have half of her aim. It feels then as though he should say something else, something amongst the lines of _‘I’ll stay with you, I won’t go either, I hate posh-kid parties anyway_ ’. But suddenly she turns around and put a finger against her lips, signaling for him to kindly shut the fuck up, for there are a lot of birds whose melodies are a thousand times more relevant than whatever it is he’s about to say. 

For that, he is grateful. He doesn’t like parties, that much is true. 

What he does like is getting thorough and utterly hammered. 

On Tuesday, Aunt Chris takes her turn at making a comment on his emotional status. 

“That’s it. I’m sendin’ that Marx joker a strongly-worded letter about this,” she declares while he finishes clearing up the last booth from half-finished beer pints and crumpled up, mustard-stained napkins. 

“Do include the fact that this is unpaid weeknight labour I’m partaking in,” he bites, to which, of course, she snickers darkly.

“A strongly-worded letter indeed.” He’s about to ask for her to take him with, whenever it is she’s planning on traveling over to Europe to deliver her handwritten rant to Karl’s gravestone, when it suddenly occurs to him, as he stares daggers into the wet dishrag he’s compulsively dragging back and forth from the wooden table under his hand, that he isn’t sure where exactly the man is buried. 

Most of what he’s read up to that point makes reference to the industrialized cities of Manchester and Liverpool, in England of course, even if his first guess would have been Germany. His hand clenches harder against the surface as he enthusiastically discards the idea of simply googling it on his phone — he banishes the thought, exiles it to the margins of his outer skull — in favour of asking a certain someone about it. 

Might he by any chance know, might he be willing to make eye contact with Roy while telling him? 

He scrubs the last of the table’s grime out and goes to leave the empty cluster of glasses by the bar without the thought ever leaving his mind. 

*

Thus, Wednesday noon appears without even a sliver of warning. 

Last week he’d taken a different seat in Kimblee’s class, one that he decides to stick to for now, if only because his thoroughly clumsy and unsophisticated sense of guilt makes such a recommendation, which he follows at a lack of better strategies to apologize to Edward with for the amount of unwarranted stress he’d caused him the other day. 

He’s kept the book for more than a week already, he’s kept annotating on it’s edges because it’s the hardest habit to kick, harder than substance abuse, harder than the block of concrete that’s tied to his ankle and keeps him sinking, it’s also more prominent than the tendency to wish himself dead, faster than how said block can drag him down. 

All of that is good and well, of course, but there’s something else to it. He does so because he wants it to be _seen_. He realizes this as the consciousness of his own writing stares back at him, the lines he draws in dark graphite in the solitude of his room. 

They’ll soon be read by someone else’s eyes; bright and golden, like he’s described to himself a million times already, irises that _trembled_ when near begging him to hide the title on his desk before that; begging him not to humiliate him yet again, not to make him walk through that same path of shredded glass once more. 

So distinctive, they swam around in his mind for hours on end after they ran into each other at the movies. 

He could never do anything against him… This also results in a more or less surprising revelation, because the slight quivering in his voice as he nonetheless attempted to keep humoring Roy through his evident panic struck a nerve with him, of a very particular type. One which felt like he’d been impaled through the chest with a spear drenched in blackthorn. 

He sees him enter the classroom now, as tense as ever. Straight back, averted gaze. It’s perhaps a little more disheartening than he expected it would be. 

When he sits down, he hears his unsteady breathing which sounds a bit more labored than usual, and the sound of him grinding the heel of his left palm against the top of his thigh under the desk, just behind the corner of his eye.

“Did Mr. Eisenhower make another appearance?” He chances the question without completely turning his head. 

When Edward doesn’t answer, he turns the rest of the way, hoping his gaze doesn’t reflect any level of scrutiny. 

Edward blinks at him, once or twice, like he’s stunned he’s being spoken to in the first place, before tentatively parting his lips in an expression that could suggest confusion. For all of Roy’s extensive training in the subtleties of nonverbal cues, he bets he’s right on the money. If he by any chance forgot one of the last conversations they had, it might be quite anxiety-inducing to have a semi-known classmate suddenly make a reference to the obscure appearances in one of your (understandably private) recurring dreams.

“You know, the nightmare?” He throws the lifeline, to which Edward reacts receptively with a gentle, 

“Oh…” He then scoffs lightly while slightly adjusting in his seat, as he always does, with the mild discomfort of a likely physical ache. “Not really, no.” He pauses while looking straight ahead at where the whiteboard is nailed to the wall, unmoving, before lightly quirking a dark blonde eyebrow. “Not that I remember, at least.” To which Roy allows himself a light smile. 

He looks back ahead. “Well Havoc was mortified, he allegedly hasn’t gotten any sleep since Friday.” 

“Ah shit,” Edward answers, “Really?” 

“Yeah he keeps hearing Charlie’s ominous tongue click,” he says, dabbling further into the movie’s citation. He hears Edward chuckle just a bit, a low, restrained sound. 

“It’s iconic,” he answers, and Roy hears him shift yet again.

“It’s…, Yeah, I guess that would be the word,” Roy concedes. “Although I honestly don’t know what he expected of an R rated movie.” He huffs, remembering his sputtering of a film critique which only consisted of endless complaints about it being the “ _wrong kind of unsettling, as in, all shades of fucking wrong._ ”

“Explicit sex acts?” Edward retorts, and it’s not that Jean Havoc isn’t well known for his overtly carnal proximity to at least half the female population at this school — he indeed exhibits all of the most traditional qualities associated with straight culture in that respect, which can only be described in what Roy likes to say about him being an ‘over the top hetero’ —, but he still didn’t expect Edward to be the jabbing type, and now that he knows, it… Sort of really makes sense. It adds a layer of snark that actually fits perfectly well with the rest of his guarded persona, which then also adds the bonus quality of being one of those very few people whose bluntness is actually funny to Roy, rather than calloused and arrogant, so he laughs at his implication, unapologetic. 

“Don’t let him catch you saying that, Edward,” he says, “He won’t take kindly to the implication that he gets his fill of, ah, titillating stimulation from going to the theatre, like a twelve-year-old in the 1930s.”

“It’s Ed,” he says, and it hits Roy like the thousand-pound derailed Death Express, going at full speed. He turns completely, before which Edward has already added, in that same, semi-monotonous inflection, “You — I mean, you can just call me Ed, it’s…” For a second there, they downright stare at each other, there’s no other word for what they do, “It’s…, What everyone calls me…, So…” 

Roy’s motor skills allow him only one nod, after which a strange kind of silence resumes. He looks back at the front of the class but feels his eyes — Ed’s eyes, he guesses, on the back of his neck. Like invisible undercurrents of unknown intentions, poking at his skin.

“And don’t worry, I won’t say anything…” Ed suddenly resumes their conversation. “How would you take to being called a 1930’s grifter for using terms like ‘titillating stimulation’ instead of just ‘porn’, anyway,” he adds. To which Roy has to make a comment,

“A ‘ _grifter_ ’, eh? That’s quite a word.” He can barely contain the quirk on his mouth, “Read much 20th century noir in your spare time?” 

Ed’s biting the inside of his lip as he blinks lazily at him, he opens his mouth enough to say, “No… My gran— uh, I, I have a — a relative who does, though.” He states this while slumping back in his seat, but that hesitance didn’t slip past Roy. "Cornell Woolrich, Chester Himes and all that…” Roy keeps his quiet while holding on to his mild suspicion.

Was the person he referred to just now a grandparent or not? It’s a strange thing to decide to backtrack on, but it’s very clearly one of those topics that one is better off not pressing. It’s baggage so thoroughly stuffed with all kinds of odds and ends that you can make it out just by the way one or two things tend towards periodically slipping out, completely on accident, with absolute shame.

He knows but crafty folk tales about his home life and what it’s like. Like Luisa, he never so much as refers to any of it in any way, shape or form. Roy can’t lie to himself with the noble temperance of not being at all interested. Who is he trying to fool, anyway? It does spark some curiosity. 

Oh, well, at least he isn’t calling him by his full name, anymore. They’re officially past formalities. 

The class begins and he’s content with ignoring Ed’s Freudian slip, for now. 

*

The text notification appears without abandon. 

It’s Thursday. He hands his car keys over to Riza. 

“What happened?” she immediately asks, tone restrained. 

He shakes his head in civilized disquiet. Obvious grief. 

He doesn’t want to remember the message word for word. He doesn’t want to completely forget it, either. It nags at his skin with all kinds of uncertainty. Lila Mustang makes random appearances every few months, every time he gets reached by an unidentified number, he knows what to expect. 

The entire weight of someone else’s undying guilt, written with too much of it, yet never in enough words to express actual interest for his life’s affairs, for him as a person, for where he’s at. He doesn’t want to think of her. 

He’s always been alright with how things turned out, he grinds his teeth in dejected anger to think that she’s the one that can’t move on. 

*

Friday comes by, and it passes over his perception like a specter of flying hours until the sky has finally darkened. He doesn’t bother changing when he comes home, and limits himself to a glass of lukewarm tap water so hastily served that he splashes it around the sink, then some of it lands on his sweater before he’s finished it completely. He slams it down on the kitchen counter and goes for the car keys, he tells Valerie to pass the message on about not expecting him back at any decent hour, to which she absentmindedly nods while keeping her eyes glued to the novel in her hands.

He turns the keys in the ignition while the medication he forgot to take in the morning swirls around lazily on his tongue. It tastes like absolute shit. What better way to wash it down than a half-finished bottle of vodka from the glove compartment? He knew he’d kept it there for all pragmatic reasons.

Less than fifteen minutes later he’s already done his rounds and picked everybody up, including an increasingly antsy Kain, who’s kept complaining about his future inability to stay away from any electronic devices that might catch his eye once they’ve made their way into Yao’s legendary estate. 

“What if they have more than three satelite light-emitting diode television sets? I mean I’ve heard Ling’s net worth is like five million bucks or something, what if the whole setup is a smart-house sort of thing? I mean that’d be too amazing not to document and — and you guys are really nice to bring me over but technically I wasn’t even invited and I’ll just want to get into all available gadgets — What if he has one of those phone-controlled indoor aluminum airplanes?” He gasps, “What if there’s more than one roomba—”

“Fuery, my man” Breda taps his chest, “Nobody fucking watches television anymore, smart-houses are an overpriced surveillance system, and you’d get a bigger kick out of an old fashioned paper plane — the unpredictability of it!” 

“Besides, it’s not like a kids RSVP birthday party, either, Kain,” Alicia laughs from the passenger’s seat next to Roy, “You just show up with booze as your entrance ticket,”

“Well said,” Havoc comments, “I’d take all I could get from the vast knowledge on social dynamics from this gal, if I were you,” he says to Fuery, who simply keeps himself gulping around a visibly contracting throat. Roy smirks. 

“Not to mention this is the king of the Kindergartners right here!” He taps Roy’s shoulder from behind. Alicia bursts out in laughter; he catches a glimpse of how nicely her short hair weaves around, she’s wearing a pair of hoop earrings that jingle quite distinctly with her every movement, and he can’t really bring himself to mind the repetitive sound. 

“No comment,” he says to that awful reference. Awful, kooky and nostalgic enough to want to make him actually crack a smile. He doesn’t. 

“Seriously — okay, who would fucking Randall be?” Havoc expands his ‘allusions to cartoon parallels’ game. 

Breda snorts, “I don’t know, but Falman would be that chick Gretchen, amirite?” He takes another swish of his beer as the car vibrates in conjoined snickering, “Oh — oh! Spinelli could be our guy Ed Elric —”

Roy doesn’t mean his arms to tense at the name, like some sort of pavlovian response, but they do. 

“Yo… I totally get that vibe,” Havoc prompts, “Yeah, like, shorter than you, Roy, but my money would be on him to kick your ass in less than five.” 

Roy huffs in faux indignation, “You forget I’m the frightful ruler that runs around half-naked with a sharpened spear in my hand.” 

“Bruh, you can’t win against someone who’s survived the adoption system,” Havoc replies, to which Kain shily hums in affirmation. 

“That’s fair enough,” Kain says. 

“Damn… So it’s really true?” Alicia asks, and now his shoulders have joined in on the tension as he waits for someone else — anyone — to take over. 

“Uh-huh,” Breda answers, “It’s pretty much common knowledge, though. But you should know more about it, huh Roy? You guys have been hangin’ lately,” 

Roy shrugs, “We just talk in class sometimes.”

“But Vato said you moved places?” Fuery very helpfully points out. 

He takes a short sip from his bottle. “Yeah, well, he makes interesting conversation,” he says, feeling Alicia’s eyes burning into him as he brings the bottle back down between his legs and holds it there to screw the cap back on single handedly, “But it’s not like we extensively discuss the fact that he’s an orphan,” he says, and it takes a lot of effort to suppress the grimace he feels immediately creep up his features at how he just phrased that. 

It sounded more aggressive than what he would have wanted it to. Perhaps it’s just the term itself… Perhaps there’s something intrinsically violent about living in this world with virtually no one to look after you. Absolutely no one to take care of you with the loving responsibility of a dedicated parent figure. 

The word felt tainted leaving his lips, like a curse. _Orphan._ The other day he almost made reference to a family member, or rather he did, in quite an ambiguous manner which has only left him wondering even more about where exactly he’s coming from. It was almost as if he’d been afraid of referring to that person as his family, like he couldn’t have that for himself, like… Like it was forbidden. Wrong. 

He grinds his tongue against the floor of his mouth, like trying to wash it out for being such an ill-mannered, crude and inconsiderate asshole. Chris would be disappointed to the moon and back, she’d be quick to add that he himself is something of a parentless child, even if he’s been gracefully spared from the social scrutiny that accompanies that status. 

Even if he’s been lucky. 

Alicia sighs next to him, but when he chances a glance he notices her face is bright with the reflection of her phone screen’s light, with which she’s already been thankfully distracted, only very distantly acknowledging his last statement. Same goes for the car at large. He lets go a strained breath and keeps his eyes forwards. He’s been too lucky, actually. 

He’s had arms to hold him whenever he needed it. Maybe calloused at times, but only through the emotional labour of constituting a patchwork family so tightly knit and yet so unlikely that he can’t believe it’s even real. He can’t believe it’s even _his._

There’s been a faint drizzle covering town for a few hours now. The raindrops upon the road’s tarmac sail him through the traffic lights with ease. 

He doesn’t want to think of her again, yet the thought has long since settled. Maybe it never left through his mind’s backdoor, to begin with, perhaps it came back with an open invitation, placed through the mention of Ed Elric’s mere existence. Because Roy Mustang is a fortunate individual in every way that Edward is not. Even if he wishes he knew nothing of his biological mother, he wishes his memories of her weren’t so deeply carved into his mind’s body with a rusty switchblade that has left the wound oozing with the stench of bittersweet memories, of a time before he was abandoned. 

He doesn’t want to think of it again, yet he incessantly wonders if Ed ever even knew his parents. If it ever hurts him to think about it, and if so, how much. 

It’d be rude to ask, yet he wonders.

It’s near 11 pm, he doesn’t know what he’s done for the rest of the day, only that they’ve all been drinking since at least 5 and are done with waiting around until it’s late enough to make an elegant, noncommittal entrance. 

“Aw, c’mon, don’t look like that, we’re gonna get you laid tonight, kid!” Havoc howls into the night; an exclamation meant for the increasingly sweaty Fuery on the back seat, shakily accepting the second or third beer Breda’s opening for him. 

“H-hard pass!” he answers. “I’m not relying on the condom you’ve kept in your wallet since the sixth grade.”

At that, Roy lets out barked laughter, loud and unapologetic. His body screams at him for intoxication, begging on its knees that he pull over and hand the keys over to any stranger sober enough to get them to Ling’s so he can just drink in peace and let the raspy wind puncture the skin on his face, letting the liquor in his tongue feel like the sea upon the sand… Closing his eyes. 

“Hey — _Roy!_ ” A fist punches his right arm and forces his eyelids up, “Eyes on the road, lunatic,” Alicia chuckles. He still doesn’t know how she’s kept enough trust in her to let him drive her around these past few weeks. Back from the movies that time, he just kept the pressure applied to the gas pedal at 20% and drove around like he was legally blind. 

He guesses they haven’t known each other that long for her to know just how shitty a driver he is — according to his shit friends, anyway. 

Eventually, although nowhere near soon enough, they pull over on a street burgeoning with teenage presence. A considerable cluster of people is making its way into a well-lit house on the left side of the street, amongst newly polished cars and regal, four-story houses, lined up at the sides of wide, uncracked, unblemished, sidewalks and perfectly groomed gardens. He squints over at what seems to be the main entrance, which at the very least does not have an American flag stuck to it’s porch, like the rest of the neighborhood apparently does, as per some sort of implicit patriotic aesthetic standard. 

He groans. “I fucking hate the part where I actually have to park this thing,” 

*

It’s nearing eleven thirty when they make their way into what has to be one of the most over-the-top housing situations he’s ever had the chance to look at. The interior design reality tv-show he’s caught a glimpse of as Valerie put the E! channel on to serve the noble purpose of a background noise while busying herself with other house chores, is about as close as he’s gotten. But even that was understandable when compared to _this_. 

He makes a point out of not staring at the monumental abstract mural paintings hung on the opposite walls of an endless foyer that leads to a much-too-wide hall that then turns into the actual party. He takes the left into what he guesses might be living room number four (at the very least), decorated with equally unavailing ornaments, weirdly shaped low hanging lamps, plush white cushions he feels terribly sorry for, a low crystal table that’s being repurposed as an extremely impractical beer-pong arena — so low, people have to play it while kneeling, which is apparently half of the appeal and all of the fun. 

He makes a mental note to go make a beeline for it as soon as he gets some more alcohol in his system. 

The itch, it’s beginning to gnaw its way further up his throat. He used to call that feeling excitement.

He hears their team’s chant somewhere in the distance and purposefully turns on his heel towards another direction until he and Havoc arrive upon a decent enough surface in which to dump all the bottles in their hands. He looks back to see the rest of the group has effectively dispersed amongst the crowd and lets out a satisfied breath; it’s a distinct form of comfort that comes along with the acceptance of society at large. Call it cultural belonging. 

It’s something he’s never really had trouble with, which he guesses might be part of the reason why he finds the likes of Ed so entrancing, in a way. Aside from extreme forms of singling out which no one should be able to tolerate, the kid really doesn’t seem to give a single fuck about others’ opinions. It’s something he seemingly expresses even through the way he _moves_ , if that’s even possible. It’s measured and at times uncertain, but he never backtracks, there’s not a single sliver of hesitance in the way he carries himself, like he’d walk through a ring of fire if he absolutely had to. 

Havoc snaps him out of his schoolgirl daydreaming with a pat to his back “Team spirit never dies,” he remarks, motioning with his beer-occupied hand towards where a band of brick-red varsity jerseys are vibrating in unison with their school’s cheer. Roy immediately blocks the wretched sound out, out of spite, yes, but also something like self-preservation, for it goes something like, 

_“… Don’t stop, don’t stop, got the broom, don’t need a mop, put your team in a box, put a ribbon on top, we’re not John Kerry 'cause we don’t flip-flop… ”_

Roy half-heartedly grunts while leaning back on the shiny, marble-top counter behind them, “Conservative high-schools are an absolute gem, Havoc.” 

“I’d say,” he snorts, “You know sometimes…, I feel like I’m stuck in a republican-produced eighties chick flick.”

“That’s oddly specific,” Roy points a gun-finger at him, “Don’t repeat it out loud, people might th—”

“Fucking Roy-Boy’s in the house!” One of them, Halcrow, the H-back, turns towards him. He’s been held back at senior for about three consecutive years and has rapidly graying hair, Roy doesn’t understand what about himself is so damn likable to people like this dude. His face has lines so sharpened and defined it’s almost like the mold for his features was labeled ‘overkill’. 

He attempts a casual smile as about 50% of the room turns their excited hollers at him, he waves noncommittally over at the team. 

Fucking hell, is this what a full-time politician feels like? John fucking Kerry? 

“Showtime, baby,” Havoc mutters amidst a clenched-toothed smile. 

“Pass me that fucking bottle,” he responds, turning around and pointing to an unopened bottle of Grey Goose distilled vodka. Havoc also procures a red plastic cup that screams ‘shitfaced’ even before it’s been purposefully filled to the brim. 

*

When he looks again, two full hours have passed, and he’s feeling positively buzzed. When asked to perform a keg-flip, he said why the hell not; when handed an anonymous glass of alcohol mixed in with tangerine LaCroix, he accepted existing within a worldly plane of terrible, _terrible_ material thrills, and took a shallow breath before downing it. Whatever it was. His gag reflex has thankfully long since been nowhere to be found. It’s as if his anatomy understands it has to be o towards his brain’s wishes. 

When he loses his shirt and then finds it again, a couple of blackout flashes later, lying on one of the million leather couches around this immense house he’s certain he’s gotten lost in already, more than once, he just hopes no one tells Riza as he proceeds to pull it back on over his head, also ignoring the mysterious pink stain that now decorates its side. He finds his jacket a couple of feet further down on the polished wooden floor, too.

When he bumps into Breda and he asks if Roy’s okay, he puts a hand on his shoulder and levels down on him, making full eye contact while semi-yelling, “I’m getting there, alright,” amongst the thunderous beats of some distant rap song. 

Breda snickers and throws his arm off. “Come play pool with us, that’ll tell ya how trashed you really are,” he yells back.

“There’s a _pool table_?” Roy asks, ringing his own ears off.

“Fuck no, Roy! There’s two! This is the fucking nice side of town, there’s actual public lighting on these streets!” 

He makes the mistake of looking past him towards where living room number two leads to an open terrace, which is also a balcony with a view to the garden on the first floor. There’s people coming in and out at a leisurely pace, amongst which he catches a glimpse of pale yellow hair, lightly whipping around a girl’s bare shoulders. The recognition is instant. Winry Rockbell is pretty well-known, too, he supposes. She’s undeniably attractive and looks pretty sharp at the moment, lazily swishing her cup’s contents around while lightly licking her pink-tainted lips, but the connection his animal brain does in light of her presence is also fatally inevitable. 

He knows who’s best friend she is. He knows. 

And Breda is still saying something to him which gets completely lost in the ambient noise of moving bodies and screaming euphoria and blinking lights and roaring music, blasted through a whole indoor-speaker sound system that makes it feel like you’re in an actual concert, getting piss-filled beer cups thrown at you from all directions. Fuck. 

She turns on her heel to go somewhere — away. 

“I gotta go,” he immediately says, and he either doesn’t hear any objections or Breda doesn’t really have any, because no one tries to stop him — although somebody probably should. 

The thought of Edward invades his mind once again, like a crack in a dam, like a bloody crusade, like a sinking ship getting full of saltwater and crushed by violent waves. Might he actually be here, somewhere? This place is a proper maze.

He makes his way through the mass of pressed bodies and distantly wonders when exactly five hundred or so more people crammed themselves into the house. Not that there’s any shortage in space, but many are the anonymous clumps of flesh and soaked cotton clothes that indistinctly rub against him to violently off-beat rhythms. It’s a jungle. It’s a murderous tundra with endless horizons, everywhere he looks he keeps searching for the same head of flowing bright hair and his desperation starts growing as all he sees is the same pattern of redundant raised bottles and cacophonous laughter. 

He thinks he sees her take up the stairs; he follows while narrowly avoiding being toppled over by the heated couples that decide the rails are an absolute god-tier option for when blind drunk and wanting to score. If this were his house, they would’ve given in under their careless steps hours ago, and there’d be a considerable death toll going. 

He reaches the top floor and starts going through the hall while leaving no stone unturned, no door unopened, no matter what he has to hastily apologize for when barging into some less than decorous situations involving desk intercourse. He huffs to himself. Classical. He only wishes it wasn’t the first time he’s witnessed a guy’s bare ass from behind as he goes at it against creaking wooden furniture, which is no doubt sticky by now with a distinct mix of bodily fluids. 

He also wishes he had the moral superiority with which to judge a situation like that. 

His regret might be showing in a pretty obvious manner, for when he opens what he thinks is the fourth or fifth door, it’s to find a well-lit guest bedroom that hasn’t been completely trashed and which contains about four or five hovering people, a queen-sized bed with an unstained silky duvet, and a couple of chairs, one of which contains a cross-legged smiling Ling who automatically waves his way upon seeing him. 

“What’s with the long face, partner?” he chirps, “Afraid you might not be getting your money’s worth of the substances you’ve procured to stupefy yourself? Step right in!” 

He’s still frozen at the door with a hand clenched around the knob when a voice on the other side makes him turn, and clench his fist even harder. 

“—… Though, I can still just rub this on my gums, yeah?” A chick in a tube dress and a bomber jacket says to Ed, who’s leisurely leaning against a bedside table behind him as he stuffs a small ziploc with an unidentified material, his gaze flickers slightly as he darts his eyes from her and back down towards his working hands a couple of times before saying, 

“I mean… Sure, your blood torrents are all more readily accessible like that, just be careful with the amount ‘cause it’ll hit you stronger —”

“ _Splendid,_ ” she says with a wolfish grin while taking back what he guesses are her own drugs. “You’re such a sweetheart — thank you, too, Ling!” She adds while turning on her heel and walking past Roy, back towards her moderately-destructive self-indulging doom. 

Roy’s own drunkenness is not yet at a level where he’d be oblivious to the slight blush that that last comment causes Ed, as he gingerly proceeds to cross his arms. 

“So?” Ling intercedes yet again and directly at him, “What’s your poison?”

“I don’t know,” he answers truthfully, yet noticing that his eyes are still obstinately set on Ed, towards whom his feet then decide they’ll move, impressively steady, if he’s being honest with himself. He reaches into the side of his jacket, which he was sure he’d taken off and promptly lost, like some other garments, at some point… He doesn’t quite feel like he’s inside his own body, or living a life he’d call his own when his pale fingers emerge from his pocket, curling around a semi-transparent orange cylinder. He looks down at it, mildly confused. 

It _is_ his. They are. He is. 

The yellow lights around the room are suddenly too loud as he keeps staring down. His name is written on printed letters around the side and pasted on the bottle, which is now half-empty, even if it isn’t supposed to be. 

He’d gotten a refill only two days ago, had he not? Maybe less than two days. Maybe that was yesterday, maybe he should call Riza and ask if she by any chance remembers him saying something about it, but he promptly scratches that thought. She’ll be asleep, mad at him for being such a glorious fuckup, disappointed yet again, worried about his constant signs of premature alzheimers. He does want to call, though. He wants to ask if she’ll come all the way up here just so he can hug her and ask if any of this is real, like he’s done on some other occasions — more than he’d like to admit —, spilling his shameful, dejected guts onto her lap, saying, “ _I just want to wake up. I want to wake up._ ” 

He keeps staring and the stale silence around the room is only broken by a voice that’s become all-too familiar in the last few weeks. 

“That…, That’s…” Ed attempts in a low voice. Roy raises his head to meet his gaze and sees melted gold rivers of stark worry, but it isn’t a sharpened intention, rather it’s an almost lulling type of concern and genuine emotion, and its current actually reaches him with its intention. 

He smiles slightly. His thoughts aren’t all that coherent, now that he’s had a few minutes to process them in relative silence, but they tell him that this, here, this is an actual person, if he’s ever seen one. 

Edward. 

_He’s_ real, is he not? He’s real because he’s wounded, too. 

“Right,” he says while moving to tuck the bottle back into darkened safety. “I guess you can always trust pharma companies,” he adds. To which Ed slightly parts his lips and Roy shouldn’t care so much about the way the words he’s about to say linger on his mouth for about two seconds, he shouldn’t feel so affected by how soft they look, when he answers, “People do say that…,” in a gentle tenor. 

And then it’s like they simply stay there, floating around in the static of their hesitant silence, of their ambiguous knowledge of the other, of the objective weirdness of the context, their eyes locked and not going anywhere soon, until Ling’s voice breaks it all like a shining hammer on a deadly slingshot.

“Alright, that’s it.” He gets up from his seat and crosses the room in record time. “You, my dude, are taking your lunch break,” he says while placing his hands over Ed’s back and forearm, leading him towards Roy. “Go get shitfaced, c’mon, you deserve it. I’ll take care of things over here for a while.”

Ed does that same thing he did when Roy tried to take him to the nurse’s office where he forces his straightened torso back with absolute reticence, like a frightened cat. 

“But you don’t know how shit works — _Ling,_ ” he says while Yao forcibly stumbles him straight into Roy’s chest. 

He gives Ed a shit-eating grin before giving him a final shove, which now also pushes Roy a few steps back and beyond the door’s threshold as he tries very hard to keep his arms from coming up to surround Ed’s coaxed frame. 

“Scram,” Ling says, maybe to both of them, and shuts the door closed on their noses. 

The music is positively deafening now; _fuck_ encompassing sound systems, is this supposed to be a ‘regression to the placenta’ type of thrill? Where a fetus is shackled without escape to the musical whims of its mother’s taste as she presses headphones into her belly? Playing Vivaldi’s 12 violins concerto at a blasting volume in the hopes that it’ll come out genius?

“Are you okay?” comes Ed’s raised voice from beside him, only then does he realize he’s been standing there, motionless, for more than what’s normally acceptable after you’ve been kicked out of a room at a party by the host himself. 

He nods, “Yeah.” He turns towards him and cocks his head in the stairway’s direction. “Let’s go get shitfaced, then.” He hopes Ed follows as he turns his back to him and starts walking forward. 

He hopes with a fervor much too intense for his liking. He hangs onto it like a drunken sailor in a tugboat, in the middle of a tropical storm — hope. The tingling on his back is unbearable as a mixture of burgeoning anticipation and being positively drunk makes its way through his system. 

He reaches the top of the stairs and takes a strained breath before looking behind his shoulder, to where a flash of gold is — thankfully — standing. “Whadya drink?” he asks. Ed shakes his head, uncertain and visibly on edge. 

“I don’t.” 

Roy arches an eyebrow, his mouth kept on a straight line. “I can fix that for you,” he offers after a second, and turns to step towards the first floor. 

Even amidst the insufferable vibration of the party’s clamor, he can feel the floorboards on these steps reverberate with the weight of Ed’s behind him. Hurried, nervous steps, they are. Roy can feel them. He smiles again. Maybe he doesn’t have to think about the medicine in his pocket. Maybe he doesn’t have to think at all. 

“Y-you don’t gotta,” he hears him by his right shoulder and chances a glance as they make their way through hell, “I’m — I should probably go look for Winry —”

Roy doesn’t really think about it as his arm shoots sideways to encompass Ed’s shoulders and pulls him out of the way when some idiot decides that jumping from the indoor balcony and onto one of the — albeit pretty fluffy looking — couches on the living room is a grand idea, but lands just a few inches shy from the hardened back’s edge, and a loud thump is heard even through the generalized roar of voices. He feels Ed wince in his hold. 

He himself has become quite desensitized to these types of displays— tricks, if you will, although Ed doesn’t look too accustomed to the fine art of completely losing yourself at house parties, and it might just have something to do with Roy’s working theory on him not being much of a social bee. He’s still impressed he’s here, now, to begin with. 

He slightly crouches down to his ear. “He’ll live,” he exclaims as they keep moving forward. When he looks again, both his hands have landed themselves on either one of Ed’s shoulders and are guiding him through the crowd in front of him. “I saw your friend a few minutes ago, by the way,” he goes on to say, still marginally closer to the crook of his neck than what’s probably appropriate. He sees a white bottle and carelessly snatches it for himself as they walk out into the first-floor terrace leading to the pool. 

“Where?” Ed turns back to him, voice tone marginally less loud now that they’re out in the open. 

“I’ll help you look for her, after you tell me your opinion on, ah…” He squints at the lifted bottle in his right hand, “Malibu coconut rum,” he reads off the label before offering it out to him. 

“Sounds wack,” Ed answers. 

“More of a straight-liquor guy yourself?” Roy asks. 

They’ve stopped a few feet shy from the edge of the pool. Ed slightly sways on his stance while apparently taking deep interest in the posh bedside loungers lined up behind him. “Not a liquor guy at all,” he says. 

“Why? What’s not to like?” Roy says while taking a long gulp for himself, even if he fully knows the answer to his own inquiry. 

Ed shrugs, still not looking at him, “Makes me weird.” 

Roy swallows his coconut-flavored, milky, sugared liquor spit and it feels like heavy cream. “You _are_ weirder than this?” 

It isn’t supposed to come out as judgemental as it does, and he presses his eyes shut together, which… Well, he isn’t quite sure what exactly that communicates. He opens his eyes to see Ed with his hands tucked into the pockets on his black hoodie, still very slightly swaying back and forth on his feet. 

“Very,” he finally answers, and doesn’t sound sad, offended or embarrassed, which is all-around a very good sign, Roy’s been on the receiving end of similar questions and it does not feel very nice. 

“But you know,” Ed says, accompanied by a very unexpected move to snatch the bottle straight out of Roy’s hand before he’s even had a chance to blink, “Rum doesn’t mix well with sertraline,”

“Well then it’s a good thing I’m not paying for your drug advice, like the rest of the school,” he retorts while taking the bottle back for himself. 

He’d like the record to show that he _also_ didn’t intend for that to sound as aggressive as it ultimately does. There’s a barrier within his own mind which is a filter dedicated to shredding all his best intentions to pieces and then proceeds to hone them up, like a million bits of shrapnel, directed at someone who doesn’t in any way deserve to be injured further. 

Roy’s an idiot, that much is clear. 

“I’m giving it pro-bono,” Ed says, and Roy sighs with relief again — internally, of course — at his unflattered snark. He’s looking straight at him now, eyes wide and determined as his mildly disheveled hair wisps around gently in the night’s air. 

“Lucky me,” he says, “And unlucky you, because I’ve been drinking for five hours.” That might be a slight understatement, seeing as it’s probably been more than six, but no one has to know. Especially not Ed, who probably already has quite an opinion about him, and it’s not necessarily a nice one. 

“What the fuck?” he says, understandably concerned, “How’re you not passed out? You’ve got— “

“The stamina of a horse? Save it, it’s a joke as old as time,” he says while taking another big, long, luxurious gulp. 

“I — oh, I hadn’t thought ab—”

“— _That_ one, Roy Boy!” A deep voice sears through the cold air, Roy looks over behind Ed to find the little group of friends surrounding Halcrow, who looks quite content with pointing straight at him. “5 second shot?” He raises what seems to be some Crown Royal Whisky,

“Here we fucking go,” he mutters to Ed, who’s also looking, except now having rapidly acquired the distinct shade of a ripe strawberry, probably at the prospect of the inevitable interaction that’s about to follow. Roy hesitates, he knows he’s the only one who sees it because he’s up this close, and is grateful for it. He feels an odd sort of defensiveness grow inside him, tightening his chest just a bit. It’s an uncomfortable sensation. 

He looks back at Halcrow and his idiot entourage; all of them looking like fresh models plucked from out of a Baby Gap catalogue and walking straight towards them. Roy licks his lips. He tries to mentally go over all the types of alcohol that he’s consumed already, trying to cross reference what things definitely don’t mix well. He comes up with nothing. His earliest memory at this point is finding Ed, and his estranged mother’s unanswered messages, of course, for those interactions always adhere to his memory like a mosquito in a sticky fly trap. 

Astounding. 

A guy in a Blue Polo rushes up to tilt the bottle over his mouth, he instinctively throws his head slightly back and opens up as the rest do the countdown.

“ _5…, 4…, 3…,_ ” They pause, and take an unnecessary yet obligated painstakingly long time in counting “ _…., 2 …., 1!_ ” 

Roy closes his mouth around the accumulated fluid, 

“Don’t pull a face at it or we start over,” Blue Polo threatens, a playful finger pointed at him in warning, but it doesn’t really taste like anything as Roy gulps it down without breaking eye contact with the guy. 

They cheer at him, Roy proceeds to lift his own Malibu up in mock toasting and once again doesn’t expect it when the glass mouth of the bottle clatters against his teeth and lips through the forceful movement of a hand that shoots up to pull it away from his grasp. 

“Okay — _stop_ ,” Ed says, a bit more forceful around the edges. 

“One for the missus, too?” Halcrow snickers while his friend offers up the bottle again, this time in Ed’s direction. 

Roy can only imagine what Ed’s face must look like at the moment. He’d normally be happy with completely ignoring the offer, were it anyone else, were it not someone whom he feels ever so slightly move a little back from his side, like he’s actually trying to hide behind him. It might not actually be Ed’s intention, and Roy isn’t really looking, but he nevertheless feels unwell at the gesture, and it has nothing to be with the boiling alcohol that’s swirling around his stomach like an impending tsunami. 

The prospect of his humiliation doesn’t sit well with him, if he’s being completely honest. 

“The name’s Edward, poindexter. And he’s alright, thank you,” he declares, using a tone he hopes leaves little room for discussion. Whatever might’ve happened next is suddenly cut short in its intention by someone’s desperate screaming beyond them all. 

“ _Darcy!_ ” someone then screeches around the pool, which has their heads turning in a manner that is sure to come with an enormous whiplash. 

Well, they’ll probably be happy to know that their miserable situation actually helped diffuse what could’ve turned into an actual drunken fistfight. Wouldn’t be his first, and he’s sure he could’ve given Blue Polo here a lesson or two in due politeness to kind blonds who hadn’t done anything wrong in their lives, ever. 

There’s a person walking over to the edge of the pool, which is now littered with red cups and odd pieces of clothing and — oh, a growing clump of vomit, swishing about, disintegrating around the water’s creases. Dandy. 

“Darcy, _dude_ , come on!” The person keeps imploringly rounding the pool’s corner towards where their friend — Darcy, he supposes — is hovering inside the water, completely clothed and positively unbothered by the whims of destiny responsible for landing him there. Whenever their friend gets close to where he’s at, Darcy has the audacity to push himself away using a foot against the pool’s wall and a waving hand to emphasize his selfish state of ecstasy. 

The unidentified savior screeches out a frustrated grunt, “Yo Darcy you know I can’t get in there, go — _c’mon_! Get the fuck out before your dumb ass drowns!” They’ve resorted to a swimming pool vacuum cleaner’s stick to attempt — and fail yet again — to reach out to their friend. “Grab on!” they say. 

The stick only manages to bump against an unjustifiably lavish inflatable swan that’s floating around with unblemished poise and dignity. 

And strategy does not take. After that, they begin paddling the water with their bare hands, as if trying to get some current on their side, begging that the tides of the Yao estate’s chlorine filled water hear their pleas. 

“Darcy man, I’m begging you!” they say, now elbow deep in their fruitless water slopping, “I straight-up fucking _beseech_ thee,” they cry out in the purest form of despair there is. 

“Should someone go pull our guy Darcy out?” Roy muses next to Ed, after realizing they’ve been standing around this spectacle of lost hope like a swarm of flies hoping someone’s in the kitchen popping some damn corn. 

“I can’t swim,” he simply says. 

“ _Ed_ ,” Roy tutts, “That’s stone fucking cold.” And maybe it’s just the alcohol, but from this angle and for a moment there, he swears he sees Edward crack a smile. 

*

It’s three in the morning and he doesn’t know exactly what he did to deserve Ed’s continued company through the night. 

No more than an hour and a half has passed since Ling sandwiched them together and out into a brave new world of alcohol and panic attacks, but they’ve already navigated what feels like the seven seas. They’ve been here and there, walking gingerly through muddied floors of broken glass and avoided getting accidentally hit by swinging meter-long blown-glass bongs that look too elaborate to be healthy for anyone’s enjoyment. 

They’ve witnessed a small group of friends scrambling in a panicked frenzy to mend the shattered ceramic vase which was placed atop a silky mantelpiece at the top of a varnished wood bookshelf and apparently contained someone’s dear ashes. 

It’s too morbid a pleasure not to be looked at.

There’s a sketchy mixture of pool water, dirt, fallen pizza ingredients and blood from someone’s barefoot walking into a broken bottle on the kitchen floor, which they promptly walk out of so as to not contribute to that ongoing death potion. Ed tries to get him to eat a slice of (assumedly so) clean pepperoni pizza but Roy keeps shaking his head until he actually feels his brain bump against the walls of his skull.

“Think about it,” Ed exclaims through the noise, “If you just eat something there’s a higher chance you’ll last longer drinking later on!” He pushes the slice against his hand, which he’s taken on his own to make him hold the piece. 

“But I don’t _want_ to last longer,” he says, to which Ed’s dark blonde eyebrows pinch together in earnest. 

“What?”

“I came here under the assurance that I’d end up face down on someone’s sumptuous garden, in a puddle of my own piss and vomit, you know?” He gestures at the ground and pushes the slice away again, to which Ed responds by pausing a second. 

When Roy is certain Ed’s about to jump ship and walk away, like he most definitely would after hearing someone say something like that, he simply looks down, takes the rejected pizza in his hand, considering for a second, lightly tilting it’s angle as if further inspecting the piece of food before shrugging and bringing it up to his mouth, taking a bite for himself. He begins leisurely chewing while looking around them; someone’s already fallen asleep in the breakfast nook. 

“I feel bad for whoever’s gonna have to clean this shit,” he says around a mouthful, his free right hand safely tucked away inside his hoodie’s pocket. Roy blinks at him. “You really wanna add to their misery?” He takes another bite and Roy blinks again. 

Well, that about caber tosses his stupidly high expectations of the night back at him with an added dash of social conscience. Will somebody just give a man the opportunity to completely vanquish himself without being an ass to others? That’s all he really wants. He shakes his head in response to Ed’s scenario.

“So fuckin’ eat,” Ed insists, Roy looks down at the half-finished slice, and thinks maybe, just maybe he can actually stomach a diminished portion. Without really thinking about it, he takes it back from out of Ed’s fingers and rips a piece off the bread at the edge. 

“It’s gotten cold,” he remarks, nodding. “That’s the best; I only wish there was some sort of electronic home appliance that caused a microwave’s reversed effect.”

“A fridge?” Ed deadpans, and Roy can’t help smiling around his munching, probably looking like a complete dumbass. 

*

“You should go look for Winry, I’m serious. I think I’ll be okay right here,” Roy says noncommittally after an unspecified amount of time has passed, and they have found themselves within the muted confines of a small library. 

There’s an entire wall dedicated to some sort of traditional tribal masks. They’re what nightmares are made of, and incredibly expensive looking. He feels Ed hesitate behind him, as if considering. Roy’s too out of it to feel like he’s losing something as Ed moves to go back outside, alone, but he wishes he was sober or right or healthy enough to be able to tell him to stay a little longer. 

Ed’s footsteps can be heard behind him, moving further away before pausing for a moment and then…, Promptly walking back to Roy’s side, for reasons entirely unknown. 

“I don’t know…,” Ed says after a moment of silence in which they’ve both taken to staring up at the barrier in front of them, filled with shining relics from a time long past, confronting them with the vacant silence of someone else’s ancestry. The music’s vibration is but a distant thump on the floor beneath them. Roy’s ears are still ringing. “This is okay, too,” Ed concludes. 

Roy can only swallow and try to control his buzzing carousel of a brain. Every object’s edges are still unclear. 

“Don’t feel sorry for me,” he says, even though he wanted it to be a question, a request of most genuine undertones. 

He wanted to ask nicely, to plead that he don’t keep looking at him like he has for a while now. Wide eyed and gingerly attempting to steer him away from drinking more. Following him around with that same nervous energy a nurse would extend to a demented senior who’s just left his room without any pants. Too concerned for someone whom they barely know, and yet already know more of than what anyone ever should. The bottle inside his jacket is burning a hole into his side with the reminder of just how badly he’s humiliated himself tonight. He grimaces. 

It’s embarrassing, yes. But it doesn’t have to turn into pity, and for that, maybe, there’s still some hope. 

Ed stays quiet for a minute, until he hears him take a shallow breath and let it out with ominous intent. 

“I don’t,” he says. 

Perhaps Roy truly is desperate for something to hold onto, at this point, because he believes him. 

“So what do you say we steal these fancy belongings and redistribute them around homeless shelters?” he begins, hoping he doesn’t sound too trashed at this point. “I mean it’s a lot of cultural capital right here.“ He’s forced to pause by a treacherous hiccup. "Unjustly accumulated for a small elite.”

Ed scoffs, likewise running his eyes through the endless collection of books. “You misunderstood the difference between private and personal property, then.” 

“Hm, yes, I probably was not diligent enough in underlining that part.” He hears Ed gently snicker and completely basks in it. “Sorry about that, again,” he starts, “I imagine it could be distracting to someone else.”

“I don’t — um, really mind,” Ed says. 

They stay quiet as Roy tries to conceal his growing imbalance, and they walk around like lost pinballs around the muted room for a little while. 

*

They’re at the very end of the ride — which he hates he can’t remember in full detail —, sitting across from each other on a carpeted floor, merely single parts of a larger circle. 

“The game’s basically called probability, or some shit like that,” Alicia does the honors of explaining to the group through growing giggles, “It goes like this; one of us proposes you do something with someone else, and pose the question what the _probability_ of that actually happening, is. You then proceed to speak a number from one to three at the same exact time. If you both utter the same number, you do the thing, if it’s different, you don’t. Capiche?” 

There’s enough excitement contained inside more than ten strained faces in the room to count as generalized consensus, so Alicia nods once in satisfaction before taking her place on the floor amongst the rest, sitting back on her calves. Roy looks over at Ed, and his coercion is coming back to him now, through bits and pieces of a hand on his shoulder, an invitation to succumb to gravity, saying something like, “ _This’ll be fun, I promise._ ”

It wasn’t a lie, per se, but he is looking quite apprehensive, and maybe it’s sort of bad that his first instinct goes along the lines of suppressing a deranged joyous giggle of his own at the sight. Yes, even if he kind of is swimming in and out of focus at the moment. 

It feels like there’s some level of unease he himself should be feeling, however distant of a sensation, however far away, beyond many layers of warm fog.

After the first few rounds of elated spit sharing between circle participants, Roy is nominated a couple of times. Sometimes he and the girl he’s set to “ _make out with for a full minute_ ” get the same number, sometimes they don’t, he never cares about it, not until someone yells both his last name alongside Ed’s. 

That’s when something gets stuck at the base of his throat, fluttering like a mad, dying, mutated butterfly. It is horrendous and wasn’t he too drunk to feel this anxious? How hadn’t he actually thought about the very pressing possibility of this outcome? 

He looks down at the half-empty plastic cup in front of his crossed legs. He thinks it’s vodka, but it evidently hasn’t done the trick. Yet another broken promise. 

“What are the chances of you and him kissing for, say… Forty seconds?” Alicia proceeds to ask, ever the devilish type.

But forty seconds isn’t too much. It’s less than what he’d been doing just now. Just in front of his next pairing. Oh, dear _God_. 

He fully expects an alarming shade of red when he looks at Ed again, but is this time only met with sheet white. He doesn’t know which one is worse, but if anything, it’s definitely a good thing he’s kissing Roy and not someone else. Someone he doesn’t know. 

Not, of course, that Roy is presuming to fully know him either, but he knows enough at this point, does he not? 

It’s a great thing that he got paired with Roy and no one else, he thinks while preparing himself for an outcome that might not even allow for anything to happen. It’s all up to chance, after all. That’s quite literally the name of the game. 

“Alright, at the count of three, then…” Someone says, he doesn’t know who, he doesn’t look at anyone who isn’t Ed, and Ed seems unfortunately shackled to the same state of petrification that doesn’t allow him to break eye contact. 

“One…,” Roy licks his lips while neutrally raising his eyebrows his way, hoping to ease his tension. “Two…,” He tries to smile reassuringly, “Three!”

When the room hears “ _Two_ ,” in an uncontested unison, it’s like they both hit a wall and shatter. He definitely saw Ed’s lips move as he said it — said the same thing he did. 

The same.

He knows what comes next and Ed’s face is even more drained of color. He’d feel sorry for him, were it not for the irredeemable, bubbling joy that suddenly sparks within his stomach, it’s the stuttering, desperate motion of someone who’s trying to ignite a lighter that just ran out of fluid. Again, again, again. 

Now there’s just one thing to be done about it, isn’t there? 

Pity, he thinks while shrugging at Ed, still maybe too intoxicated to think about the way he’s already moving to close the distance between them, it suddenly seems too far away but he keeps pushing himself forward on his palms and heels, as if trying not to compromise his cross-legged-pretzel. Ed doesn’t move. A single inch. He sees him. Roy sees right back.

Gold, black, gold, black. Glorious. 

Roy extends a charitable hand his way, inviting him further into the circle. He jerks his fingers inwards while hoping with every inch of his run-down being that he isn’t being at all menacing. He knows the stakes of these types of encounters are already too high, there’s no telling what kind of judgement awaits those who decide to walk away from the challenge proposed by this drunken game’s tyranny. He knows Ed well enough, well enough to understand that he wouldn’t want that for himself. 

It’s terrible when he thinks about it, but he’s got his eyes plastered to Ed’s uncertain mouth, and everyone around them has erupted in burgeoning giggles and cheers of strained anticipation. Homoerotic encounters always make it to the top three in a high school party’s most entertaining activities. It sometimes even tops beer-pong and valuable-object-breaking, which tend to be the other two. 

Ed very gingerly brings both his hands from out of where he’d been keeping them, apprehensively laced together on his lap, to place his palms on the floor at either side and mimic Roy’s shuffling to begin inching himself forward. Roy’s heart skips a beat or several. 

It’s for the second time that he perceives the room’s lighting as too warm, too bright, too indescribably suffocating as the illumination ricochets against Ed’s giant golden orbs which never stop sneaking glances towards his side, anxiously taking in the room and the unknown people that surround them both, sitting on their knees and almost clapping their hands at every spectacle.

Roy sees what it means, his eyes flicker with the sentience of someone who perceives certain doom. His lower lip very lightly twitches in a manner that, much like a majority of Ed’s physical cues, can’t really be perceived if not at a close enough distance, like a secret hiding itself in plain sight. 

Which of course, means they’re close enough now.

“Don’t look at them,” Roy says. 

That earns him Ed’s attention, and at that moment, he’s certain it’s all he could ever ask for. Because he’s an idiot, of course, and so, so, _so_ far gone. 

As soon as Ed turns his gaze to him, he wastes no time in closing the remaining distance between their mouths. He brings his lips to his with enough pressure, but careful to not actually slam himself into his face through the force of his so-called bravado. He hears Ed take a short, startled breath in through his nose at the contact, he feels his entire frame pause.

Roy keeps his own slightly parted when first their mouths meet, so as to gently capture a bit of Ed’s lips within his, before moving to close around them with that same practiced brush he’s used into exhaustion since he was about thirteen and learned all about the ins and outs of oral fixations. 

Ed’s lips barely press back against his, as he’d sort of expected, and they do the bare minimum to respond to his ministrations, which is also quite alright with him. 

He brings his right hand up and proceeds to place a deft thumb along Ed’s jawline, gently pressing his print on the firm bone there — as gently as he thinks he can, anyhow, what with his senses skewed under the influence of various substances —, against the feverish skin that now mildly quivers under him. He doesn’t open his eyes, only hears the swirling gasps and bubbling excitement around himself as he slowly but rather confidently works his tongue into Ed’s warm mouth, coaxing it open. 

The boy under him feels pliant, the skin on his lips soft and slippery with their shared saliva. Once granted entrance, Roy wastes no time and flicks his tongue over Ed’s own, at first playfully experimental, like he’s caught it trying to hide from his and wants it to know, it has no chances of escaping. Not a single chance in hell. He senses Ed’s stifled gasp reverberate through his own body at that, the air from his throat feels like it’s sucked out in that moment, stolen by Ed, disappearing into his mouth. 

Ed doesn’t move; he still does not push into the kiss, yet neither does he attempt to pull back, so Roy takes the chance to move the right hand he’d placed on the side of his face up towards his ear, expanding the rest of his fingers along the hair at the back of his head, then downwards towards the nape of his neck, where he swipes his thumb against the hot skin encountered below his earlobe while his lips keep draping themselves over Edward’s.

He momentarily parts from him and retreats no more than a few centimeters, he sees a flash of Ed’s wide golden irises when he opens his eyes, with just a second of lethargy after Roy’s own, and breathes through a swollen, slightly panting mouth that’s clearly filled with surprise. He honestly has to strain not to smile over it. 

The moment lasts less than a quarter second before he’s using his hold on the nape of Ed’s neck to pull him forward and press him against Roy’s own waiting lips in order to resume the kiss. His treatment is met with absolutely no resistance as the younger boy lets himself lean towards him. 

They’ve probably not been at it for longer than thirty seconds. He couldn’t truly care less about the time count, if he’s being completely honest with himself — and the world; and the eager crowd of drunken people that are cheering them on from the sidelines, crying out in a mixture of indirect arousal and near ghoulish fascination; and whatever precious deity decided to grant him this entire situation; hand it to him in a silver platter of blessed destiny. 

Edward is being so receptive, he has trouble believing any of this is real. He sees flashes come through the back of his eyelids, otherwise darkened and filled with sunspots from the thousand light bulbs that decorate the space they’re in. Something awful in him wants to relish being on display like this, wants to prompt them to keep on looking, to look at them all they want, to look at _Ed;_ how amazing he is, how great his warm lips feel, how unbelievable and deceivingly soft the skin on his cheek is, how good he smells, how unreal it is to have your fingers in some of his hair, how whip-smart, kind and unintentionally funny he is, how mysterious, unknown, private, puzzling, strange. Fucking attractive. 

Is he exaggerating at the moment? Might he have become a slave for hyperbole? 

All he knows is he wants to get up, procure himself a megaphone and yell at all of their passive onlookers, to demand answers to one of the most bizarre and impossible enigmas of the world. ‘ _How the hell has anyone not seen him the way I do before? How is it this obvious he’s never been kissed?_ ’

His hands begin to lightly tingle with the surrounding buzz and the infinity of the action he’s partaking in. Their weight is now more evenly distributed as he’s pulled Ed into being more active, and after a few more seconds of his right hand lightly caressing his burning neck, his left has also abandoned the ground to come gently grasp Ed's right shoulder, neither of his hands are closed around a coaxing, hardened hold, and then Ed starts pressing into him with hesitant intent, but the gesture doesn’t get lost on Roy, who can’t help but hum approvingly at him, it’s pathetic how much he’s gotten into it, maybe. Maybe not. 

He hopes he’s effectively conveying just how much Ed should tell his social anxiety to go eat a bag of dicks. He wishes he’d gotten at least a drink or two in him, but he’s not the type to insist too much after more than two failed attempts at convincing him about the amazing payoff in downing cheap strawberry flavored vodka or at least a shot of that deadly looking “Vodkila” bottle, which quite literally has a skull in its logo. Ed was probably right in his hunch about that one, and it’s probably a good thing that he halted Roy’s innate curiosity by stepping right in front of him, ever the stubborn, straight-edge busybody he’d become during the night. Stubborn and headstrong, and physically stronger than he looks as he actually managed to force Roy back with a closed fist pressed against his chest, even as Roy tried to put up an actual fight, and _shit._

It’s at some point further down the line of time, that he has enough presence of mind to realize that none of the noises currently embedded into the soundscape that contains them is even remotely similar to anyone doing a countdown…, As it should be. As tradition usually dictates. 

Did a collective timer never start? Did it actually stop a while ago? Did they manage to float themselves into the ether through the sheer force of their electrifying semi-forced, completely public make-out session?

They part their lips again, Edward licks his, Roy does the same, and they share a moment of eye contact before looking around them to where a small crowd has gathered, small in comparison to the overall attendance at this house, but bigger than it was before he got reeled into this dazing experience.

Everyone’s smile is wolfish and uncontained, they’re nearly hooting through the unrestrained exhilaration of having witnessed something completely off the charts, as far as party game etiquette goes, and having had the fortune of being in the right place, at the right time, capturing a moment on their phones to be eternally cherished by their panopticon-like digitized community of spectacle-loving social media. 

Roy doesn’t really care about it, at this point. He casually leans back into his palms after slowly letting go of Ed and keeps up his questioning look. 

“If you wanted to go at it for an entire minute and a half, you two coulda just proposed it yourselves,” Alicia grins, her speech now substantially slurred, more so than how it was when explaining the rules a while back. “ _Damn._ ”

“Well you didn’t tell me to stop, so,” Roy answers, going for the abandoned cup behind him, one he’s almost certain was his to begin with. About 60% sure, that is. 

Someone else snorts beside them, a couple of eager, fevered voices pitch in with an unbelieving, “ _We did!_ ” And everything topples over. A wave of overheated tension finally spills beyond any of their reaches as the audience’s united voices cackle and revel in their pleased passiveness to the ongoing show. 

Roy rolls his eyes at Alicia, she shrugs and Ed inches backwards a little, curling his legs back against his chest before more decidedly placing his feet under himself and getting up with a hissed, “Shit.” Never taking his eyes off the ground.

Roy’s arms are lead at his sides, he doesn’t react soon enough and before he knows it Ed’s disappeared beyond his line of sight, made his way through the mob of intoxicated people and outwards into the edge of the world, vanished. 

“Fuck,” Roy groans, downing his drink and getting up himself, “Great job.” He directs his sarcasm at an unbothered Alicia who just raises her hands in a mixture of confused vexation and happy, inebriated indifference. She has the good grace to at the very least widen her eyes a notch, feigning an actual impression at what just happened, but Roy can’t really blame her for wanting to watch the world burn, it is kind of why they’re all here. Well, maybe not Ed, that much is clear. 

“What?” She mouths, but Roy isn’t wasting a second longer around any of them. She isn’t a bad person, quite the contrary, no one really did anything wrong, and yet something in him feels terribly off while he navigates through the crowd, calling after Ed, being mildly successful at ignoring the way the room is spinning. He at least knows that if, or _after_ he throws up, he can still keep going. Regurgitating isn’t really a stop sign unless you want to make it one. 

Maybe it’s just his impression, he hasn’t been feeling at all great for a while and what just happened could very well be interpreted as a mere blip, consisting of an unsullied, lily-white high point of actual contentedness within an otherwise uninterrupted downwards spiral. Maybe it was just the opposite experience for Edward, he sure as hell seemed pretty okay with the prospect of spending this entire evening behind closed doors with Ling Yao, and he just had to barge in like he was owed something, flaunting his sad little life around with his sad little sad-people medicine that no one asked to see. 

None of it would have gotten him anywhere, now he knows. At the very least, he wants the opportunity to apologize for everything. For that to happen, though, he’ll have to be willing to get real fucking lost again, perhaps find a door into another dimension and not be able to ever make his way back or perhaps find a room only dedicated to elaborate booby traps thought for burglars and die, crushed alive by a giant rolling stone before he ever gets the chance to redeem himself in the eyes of the only person he can think of, no matter how hard he tries not to…, Perhaps.

It’s a good thing he’s ready.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Howdy welcome back and may you all enjoy a fitting way to celebrate this solemn occasion known as October 3rd. I wasn't sure that I was gonna post anything fma-related on this date but this was returned today as a definite sign so here you go!!! 
> 
> Edit: I cannot believe I have a high school au that does *not* include a mean girls reference. Weep with me over this lost golden opportunity and do consider that scene as canon in this universe. God bless.
> 
> cw: domestic abuse, negative self-image, your healthy common dose of social anxiety.

There’s an open door that urgently calls to him like a sucking vortex when he finally makes it all the way up the stairs, stumbling to near death and catching himself with open palms on the following step more than once. No one says anything while he not-so-kindly pushes his way through the people lingering at the hall. They probably assume he’s making a run for it to empty half his weight’s worth of vomit on some toilet that’s already been thoroughly abused by now. 

He’s not entirely sure that he isn’t. 

Because it’s late. Or early. Or really past the fucking time in which he told himself he’d leave, and this is what he gets for lingering. 

It’s like the door locks through the force of his beating blood, of his own crazed heart against his ears, pumping his skull raw until he braces himself against the sink and stares at his ghost of a reflection. He thinks he orders his brain to take a deep breath, but mirror-Ed doesn’t seem to be functioning at all. He just blinks back, breathing through his mouth, his lips look sticky, his eyes far gone. 

_You idiot._

He feels like a fly whose 24 hours have elapsed. 

Like slobbering gum plastered on the pavement. 

He looks down at a cracked sink — the broken pale pink tiles that decorate its edges under the mirror’s elegant light. It’s no wishing well, that’s for sure. And his life is not poetic. There’s no particular meaning to any of this. He tenses as a kind of delayed reaction to a crash after it’s already happened, at an unstoppable 930kph, flying against the top of a mountain and he’ll gladly die in the wreckage if it means not having to actually look down at the semi-formed hard-on attached to him. 

“ _Fuck,_ ” he mutters, in accordance with all that his boiled mush of a brain is capable of providing at the moment, out of breath. “Fuck, fuck, shit…” Nausea hits him like an angry confrontation, his bones feel like they’re on fire, he senses the rumor of crazed laughter forming in his stomach. 

Or maybe it’s a sob. 

Or maybe it’s Mustang’s teeth, still grazing against the smooth skin on the inside of his lower lip. He tells himself to shut up, but his mind retorts with the fact that no one other than himself had ever touched him there. That spot in him. He runs his tongue against it and shivers. Before he knows it, two unsteady fingers are in his mouth, patting at the eternal wetness as if he’d never truly felt it prior to this point in his life. He’s like a child, feeling for the space where his baby teeth used to be. 

He shakily strokes the damp patch in his mouth that’s been colored by the taste of someone else’s coconut Malibu. Another chill runs down his spine like it’s a ghost on roller skates. 

This can’t be a first, can it? He thinks he kissed a girl in kindergarten while playing house and his mom was called about it, but that might be a blurry picture from someone else’s memories. 

He thinks another one with low auburn pigtails and Sunday school shoes pressed her mouth against his in sixth grade, as a dare forced on her by her group of snickering friends. He thinks she viciously wiped her mouth with the back of her palm straight after, before he could even process what had happened. He thinks that that’s when he learned about what things are pretty and what things are not, and all about how he falls into the latter category. 

Some people at this school know. They’ve seen it for themselves. They know from that short period of time before he managed to negotiate with Counselor Hughes about bailing him out of the P.E. curricular requirement. He got a smile full of pity and two green eyes like molten metal, trying and failing miserably to keep themselves stoic as the man gently granted him his wish. It’s one of the longest conversations he’s ever had and it lasted less than ten minutes. 

Ed takes both trembling fingers out of his mouth, the better to grind the heel of his palm against his eye socket. 

“Shut the fuck up,” he mutters to himself. “Shut up.” This is truly no time to get on the self-condolence carousel. Already he can feel the floor caving under his feet when he looks down at his faded grey jeans and sighs shakily at the incessant hardness. He wants to cry.

Is any of this normal? 

Does it always feel like cardiac arrest? 

He’s pacing. His breath comes in stuttering spurts and suddenly he’s contemplating the very real possibility of having a panic attack while holding a goddamned fucking erection at the same time. Yeah, partying isn’t his thing. 

He hopes a deadly earthquake strikes them all clean of the Earth as Roy’s smiling face hijacks his brain with flashes reminiscent of the last two or so hours. The way the corner of his eyes crinkle. 

The way he smells. The strength of his right hand. 

“Okay,” he shakily speaks to himself in a feigned sense of resolve, “ _Okay_ …” 

A few moments pass while he stares at the fractured tiles. He absentmindedly looks down at himself again and groans, frustrated. He fights the growing urge to rummage through the cabinet for some lefty scissors to just cut his dick off with. Should he just press himself against a wall until it goes away? His lips are swollen. How long was it, then? Cause he didn’t hear shit, either. 

Christ. Jesus Fuck. 

Dante would slap him for using the Lord’s name in such a blasphemous manner, as she has for all of his more than colorful language in the past. The memory of that is just as fresh — a mouth filled with soap, spit, and lukewarm tap water, a rigid hand pushing his face down on a porcelain basin as he tried suppressing his gag reflex, if only to not give her the satisfaction of it. 

“ _That’ll teach you…_ ” 

A knock snaps him out of it. 

“Fuck off,” he calls out. He’s not breathing right. He should’ve brought his medicine with him, he knew it. 

The mismatched texture of his hands nervously rubs his face down — hasty, repetitive. He involuntarily chokes on his spit and is only mildly disappointed when he doesn’t just die like that. 

Maybe he gets the gist of drinking yourself blind, now. 

There’s a silver lining, though. Thinking back on all these happy memories — all the good times he’s had since he was thirteen and entered Dante’s God-fearing misery wagon for emotionally maimed children — really does the trick with killing off any hint of confused arousal in him. It works like a charm and he’s normal again. 

His reflection winks. Life hacks. 

A series of consecutive — albeit scattered — knocks insist at the door a tad more decidedly. He definitely doesn’t jump out of his skin when he hears that voice on the other side. 

“Ed?” 

“Motherfucker,” he mumbles to himself. He lets a moment pass before answering, “Yeah,” with what he hopes is a noncommittal tone. He’ll hang on to that hope for dear life. 

“Hey…, Uh, are you alright?” Mustang says. ‘ _Dandy. Just dying of embarrassment while considering the pros and cons of dismembering myself in one of Ling’s bathrooms. Normal teen drama shenanigans, you know how it is,_ ’ he thinks. 

“Fine,” he answers, physically straining to get his limbic system under control. Fighting for breath. Burning at 21 degrees celsius. Did he come after him? Why in the world? Is it to wring some more comedic value out of his existence? Are the others there, too? 

“I’m sorry about that, back there.” He hears a low hiccup, he wants to roll his eyes at the obvious drunkenness but all he manages to feel is a choking flutter attacking his throat. “Don’t mind them, no one has the presence to remember any of this come Monday,” he assures, and he sounds sincere enough. Maybe. Who the fuck knows. Ed doesn’t know him that well, after all. He didn’t know he had the capacity to kill someone with his _tongue,_ for one. That ought to make for a blazing first prize in next month’s talent show. 

Ed doesn’t know what to say, or maybe he’s forgotten how to speak, or maybe he just can’t because a cat named Roy Mustang _did_ in fact steal his tongue. And his brain. And the bones on his knees and both his right and left ventricles as well as pulmonary arteries. He’s a bloody carcass of a person who doesn’t know about casual answers, he just took what little was left of himself and made a run for it, so silence resumes at both sides of the door, filled only by nondescript background vibrations. 

Ed assumes he’s left and that’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay. It’s good. 

“I, ah, you know that girl Sophie Bergman?” His bass-like voice comes up again, and Ed swears he sees the door rattle, “I don’t think you two have any classes together, short, bleached hair? Anyway, two years ago I got kicked out of her house because I was so hammered I tripped down her stairs and took out every rung in the banister on the way down— and I do mean every single one.” He hears him scoff, “Her dad went berserk on me, threatened to call the cops and sue a fifteen-year-old for material damage, so naturally, I attempted to prove to him that it was fixable. I crawled my way back to the base of the stairs and began my handyman labor by pushing each broken bar up in the hopes that they’d stick by the simple grace of our Lord…” He concludes with dramatized inflection, slightly muffled by the wooden door between them, “Any way that’s — that’s at least what some people told me afterwards. The only evidence I had left of that night was a mysteriously sprained ankle, and — and, the point is, no one even recalls that episode anymore. I’m sure if you were to ask Sophie herself, she wouldn’t remember the whole story. She was pretty drunk herself, plus we coexist on great terms nowadays — ” 

“Mustang, even _I_ know that story.” He clips back, only then realizing he’s inched his way towards the door and is absentmindedly leaning on it. “It has a name,” he says.

“Oh?” Roy muses.

“Clandestine Carpenter Regan Macneil,” Ed answers, “Or, or some shit like that.” Maybe snide is the best remedy for impending doom because his arms aren’t shaking as bad anymore. He looks down at his feet. A beat passes. Then he hears Roy chuckle. 

“I don’t listen to folk tales,” he says. “And I get the sense that you don’t either, so there’s really nothing to worry about here.”

He takes too long to mumble, “‘M not worried,” and another few seconds of muteness follow close behind. 

“Are you alone in there?”

Ed swallows. “Yeah.” 

The music goes on incessantly, song after song of mismatched genres at an impossible volume. The floor thumps. 

“Would you,” Roy hiccups again, “Would you mind if I, ah, join you?” 

Ed doesn’t know if the scorching hot and icy cold that runs through his veins at the moment is a sign of excitement or dreadful apprehension. He doesn’t know that there’s any difference between the two at the moment. He doesn’t know that it matters, because his hand extends in front of him and unlocks the door before he can think better of it. Before his screeching mind can tell him all about what a braindead idiot he’s being.

The first thing he sees is the guy’s apparently characteristic drunken flush, high on both his cheeks. His stance is relaxed as he leans on the door’s frame and things suddenly feel slower somehow. There’s a lethargic sort of invisible hum that seems to accompany everything Roy does, the way he blinks, the way he moves, the way he goes about existing, and Ed kind of gets it, now.

It gives the worst type of fucking whiplash to leave his side after so long of doing things his way. Because his world is one of firm grips and leisurely smiles. Ed’s is one of hasty fire, clusterfuck emotions, stitches, fatigue, running. 

Just looking makes him feel different. Just looking.

Roy doesn’t immediately move, but rather lets himself hand out one of those grins. Ed responds to the best of his ability, which isn’t much, because his mind isn’t all here and when it is it doesn’t work very well, but it’s what he can give at the moment. He moves after a few elongated seconds of standing dumbly on the other side, only then realizing Roy is probably waiting for him to give way — an explicit invitation. Stepping aside has never felt more significant. 

Mustang takes a few slow steps past that threshold as Ed stakes some back, he leans against the sink with his back facing the mirror. He watches Roy gently push the door closed without breaking eye contact.

“You mind?” he asks while placing his fingers on the lock. 

Ed blinks and shakes his head. His eyeballs feel dry as sand. 

_Click_. 

Roy idly looks around, languidly crossing his arms while leaning against the wall next to the entrance. He’s about to start blushing himself into oblivion before Roy glances past him and towards the empty bathroom, his eyes narrow with some sort of understanding and before Ed can process, he’s pushing his way past him and towards the end of the room.

“I — what —” he starts, but quickly realizes Roy’s lifting a determined hand up to the cloudy white shower curtain that drapes over a bathtub he hadn’t bothered paying much attention to. The metal rings clatter over their railing and Roy swipes it aside to reveal a very much occupied white tub, where two huddled figures are tangled into each other. He turns to look at Ed. 

“Seems like you do have some company, after all,” he muses. Ed pauses. 

He _had_ thought, in some sort of distant way, that he’d been way too lucky to have found himself such a pristinely available space in which to dry heave and have a nervous breakdown with all the privacy in the world. 

Maybe he thought the laws of karma had decided to let him have this one thing. That Libra season, or whatever the fuck, was a kind one that brought some degree of good fortune about. He was wrong. What else is new. 

At least they weren’t actively listening in on him. 

“Are they… Dead?” Ed gingerly makes his way towards Roy’s side to peer over two sleeping figures. 

“They might be,” Roy answers. “Have you ever witnessed a crime scene?” he asks, tone low and falsely menacing. 

Ed holds on to his snark and crouches down while extending his bare hand towards someone’s sleeping form, he curls his fingers inwardly and lets his index stop a few millimeters short below that person’s nose, feeling for signs of life with the back of it. There’s some air flowing, alright. Despite the greatest odds of someone being so blackout drunk that they fall asleep with another person’s muddy shoes digging into their cheek and their limbs tangled in a way that can only be categorized as unsafe. 

“Verdict?” Mustang asks once Ed straightens himself back to his side. 

“I guess someone’s gonna have an adventure coming up with an excuse for that,” he points at where a grimy sole is sticking to their face, likely already having worked a shoe-shaped imprint that may or may not turn into a bruise. Roy chuckles as he himself moves to bat that person’s ankle away, to which they respond with absolutely no cognition. 

“And people say I have a drinking problem,” he hears him grouch under his breath. Ed pretends not to hear it and doesn’t say anything. After a beat of quiet, Mustang turns and takes a few steps back, leaving an annoyingly acute streak of his distinct aroma behind. Ed automatically tenses. “Checking every single space is one of the golden rules of house party survival,” he says. “So as to ensure privacy and all that.” 

Ed mindlessly nods, he moves back to take his spot by the sink again. Maybe it’s all about the way in which the porcelain is cracked and ugly — his attachment to being near it. The rapport they’ve established as secret panic companions. 

“So,” Roy begins, standing across from him, tone unbothered and a small smile returning to his features. Ed’s own arms crossed themselves over his chest at some point. 

“So…” he answers. The loud thump of distant commotions reverberates through the small space between them. 

“Not a fan of crowds, I take it?” he says, lightly cocking his head in the door’s direction. 

Ed scoffs, “You’re awfully perceptive,” 

“I try,” Roy — keeps fucking smiling. Like Ed didn’t just insult his set of oral skills by walking out on him like that, blushing like a prude and getting turned on by the absolute most common shit there is. Making such a big deal out of things. Like he wasn’t his most mediocre kissing partner. Like he didn’t do anything wrong. Like he’s actually worth running after and locking yourself in a trashed bathroom with.

His lower lip tastes of metal as he worries at it. “I’m…, I just fucking hate those types of games.” He shrugs. 

“Yeah?” There’s an edge to his quirked lips, then, Ed’s perception catches it as a sort of hint at the tail end of his intonation. An ongoing innuendo. Like he’s telling an inside joke that Ed isn’t getting because he’s currently only got two brain cells allocated to the mission of processing speech and reading non-verbal cues. 

The rest, of course, are all focused on the task of not dropping dead at how close they’re standing. 

“Yeah…” he answers breathily, quickly losing the amount of confidence needed to maintain eye contact, so instead his eyes slip towards a pair of undeniably toned arms, a shape barely concealed under a navy blue jean jacket that works miracles in the framing-a-torso-already-sculpted-by-deities business. 

He stares. 

His heart’s beating against the roof of his mouth, and it’s too late for him. 

He already knows this when Mustang takes his hands out his pockets and starts walking forward in slow steps, Ed doesn’t miss the way he kind of sways to his left before continuing onwards.

“So why’d you play it?” he asks, and he doesn’t stop moving even as they’re less than thirty centimeters away and his words are hitting Ed with a wave of undeniable warmth and his voice has dropped into the realms of negative numbers and Ed presses himself further against the sink but there’s no more space in which to move and maybe that’s alright. 

“I’d assume you’re familiar with the concept of peer pressure?” he manages in a raspy voice, barely salvaging his words from the claws of the terrible shakes. “Mr. Five second shot?” And this is where Roy’s grin turns feral. 

He leans towards him like a stalking gazelle, Ed feels like he’s staring up into a black sun. There’s no denying shit because he feels it. Feels the tingling cancer of infatuation taking over his guts. 

“I feel so bad for you,” Roy starts, and they’re close enough that Ed swallows his own breath in an attempt not to give anything away, even if that boat has probably sailed by now… Sailed and sunk into glorious death. They’re close enough that Roy’s breath brushes against the skin on his neck and every hair on his body stands on high alert. “Coerced into this horrible venture…,” he downright purrs, the shining onyx in his eyes slowly traveling to his side. 

“It wasn’t — I wouldn’t say — _horrible_ …” he blurts out before his brain gets a chance to put his fist in his mouth. “J-just…” 

But words get lost in sensation when Roy lifts his hand and suddenly Ed feels a strand of hair catch, it’s a feather-light tug, practically imperceptible. He looks at where Roy’s right hand emerges into his view after a second, holding an insignificant little ball of white fuzz between his index and thumb, rolling it between his digits as if it were a fairy’s form, something he’d never thought he’d see for himself. He finally pulls it from out of the feeble strands of blonde hair that had caught on to it and holds it in front of Ed’s nose. 

“Make a wish,” he says, and it hadn’t occurred to him that the left hand he’s placed over the sink behind Ed might be more of a steadying tactic for his drunken body than it is a courtship strategy. Either way, Ed tenses, his lips tingle in taut anticipation as he works his jaw. 

“That’s with eyelashes, dumbass,” he whispers, too far gone to think about the fact that this is officially the first time he’s ever insulted Roy Mustang, only too late realizing his slip. 

Roy blinks, unaltered. “Fine, give me an eyelash.” He matches Ed’s low voice. 

Ed tucks his lips inside his mouth, he shakes his head. 

“They don’t grow back,” and he has no idea what he’s even saying at this point, but whatever fact-checking of that statement his mind has begun to invest itself in is swiftly given a merciless death when Roy’s charcoaled eyes widen as he flicks the fluff off his fingers and brings a thumb up to Ed’s left eye, running its pad over his lid in a slow, horizontal stroke as Ed closes it on instinct. 

“Really?” he marvels, voice coarse and distant. The heat of his palm permeates itself straight past the first layers of dermis on Ed’s cheek, it’s warmth travels all the way down through the side of his neck and onto his shoulder. Ed twitches, but Roy’s hand is as steady and unmoving as ever, his thumb barely applying the pressure it would take to squash an ant as it brushes itself back and forth. It’s gentle, a hostile contrast to the way his insides are buzzing unsteadily, boiling over, tripping on themselves. 

Ed watches him with one eye open.

Something deep inside him yells that this isn’t good, that people aren’t supposed to be able to empty your pockets without even touching you. That he isn’t supposed to be as transparent as he feels. This isn’t good. 

“You could wish for me to leave, if you…,” he murmurs after a moment of silence, the hot, heady scent of Jager immediately reaches Ed and he seriously wonders if it’s possible to get contact drunk. “If you want to be alone,” he concludes, parting just a little, straightening his back to slightly pull away.

He feels the lost contact, his cheek goes cold. 

A part of him wants to say yes, leave, leave me. A part of him wants to scream it. To ask for loveless hands, to be pushed off, to be laughed at. Reminded of how bad rejection scalds, to walk back home like a grimy worm hiding from the lamplights. To have it make sense. Pain he can handle — it’s so meaningless and absurd and common a simple chemist can fix it for you in a flash. _Leave._ Rip a bandaid — five bandaids, a hundred bandaids. All of them. 

The chill that rushes past every single vertebra at how Mustang keeps looking down at him is near intoxicating, and Ed’s no master at romance or venom or the double-edged swords of meaning, but he’s pretty sure that the thermal change in this room is both their faults. 

Without thinking much further, he shakes his head, trying his best to keep his eyes on Roy’s, and the reaction is immediate — that is to say that there’s no delay in the way he brings both his hands to the sides of Ed’s hips and props him up like he weighs as much as a wooden chair with a missing leg. To say that he squeaks at the motion would be granting him too much dignity, but before he can even be ashamed of it, he’s sitting atop the broken surface and Mustang’s lips are attacking his without much preamble, his strong, warm body fitting itself in between Ed’s dangling legs and placing his hands on the surface at either side of him. 

This time, it feels reckless. He lets his eyes fall closed and Roy’s breath tickles his cheek as he sighs out through his nose. All his neurons fritz and scramble and bang against each other, synapse happens like an electric stutter. He’s just as ill-prepared for it as the first time. 

Ed’s back soon hits the mirror as his upper torso gives in under Mustang’s leaning weight and he brings his right leg up, the heel of his boot presses against the outer edge of the sink next to him and he uses the leverage to push himself upright without breaking the scorching kiss. 

His hands hesitate at the prospect of touching Roy’s face as he starts moving his lips, slow, uncertain. He doesn’t really know how to go about it and worries about mirroring his exact motions and looking like an idiot. It’d also be weird to make contact with his gloved hand, so he lets it fall by his side and presses himself further up into Roy’s hot mouth. 

His lips respond by pulling into something he guesses is a smile, Roy hums his muzzled chuckle and the smugness of it hits a distinct nerve that manifests through Ed venturing into the realm of bites — it’s not as hard as he could do it, definitely not as hard as this godly bastard deserves it, but he still catches his balmy lower lip between his teeth with resolute firmness and gives it an experimental yet purposeful pull. It feels so soft and fits so well inside his mouth he has to stop himself from gasping for air. 

Roy’s mirth isn’t in the least bit dissuaded by the gesture and he lets out a low noise, knowing and content and something in Ed wants to downright growl at him. 

They breathe through stealing each other’s humid, sticky oxygen. 

Roy brings his hand up again, this time to his chin, a resolute thumb pushing it down to coax his mouth open. Ed follows it’s lead, tentatively poking his tongue outwards and doing a very nice job out of not jumping when Roy catches it between his teeth and begins expertly sucking at it, he feels a mild scratch against his skin and there’s something like a moan tugging at the base of his throat until a sharp edge suddenly digs itself into his right palm and he hisses away, nearly banging the back of his head against the mirror through the blunt force of the needling pain. 

Roy immediately leans off, eyes widened, though still high off whatever it is that particular trick was doing for him. “What is it?” he asks, voice strained, slightly panting. 

Ed looks down at his palm, there’s a piece of broken ceramic tile stuck to it, marginal but prominent enough to make skin break and have a flowing warmth coat his hand underneath the glove’s thin cotton. 

“Shit…,” he mutters while pulling the jagged piece off, and watching it’s light fabric begin to darken around a growing bloodstain. 

“Here,” Roy extends both hands towards him, “Let me see.” Ed is quick to snatch his hand back and protectively bring it against his chest. 

“It’s fine, it’s nothing,” he answers, but Roy’s got a hold of his wrist before he finishes the hasty sentence and he’s turning his palm upwards to inspect the wound before Ed can even get another syllable out. 

There’s a truth so obvious about it’s covered form that he doesn’t feel the need to voice it. It’s his fucked up hand. It’s concealed as a public service — it’s not pretty, it’s not nice to look at, people don’t consent to witness deformity. 

“I…,” he starts, but doesn’t continue. What is there to say, really? 

Roy seems unbothered as he looks down at his extremity, held between both of his own, and slowly lifts the lower edge of the glove upwards with a confident thumb while the rest of his fingers curl around his wrist. 

Ed holds his breath, holds on to Roy’s taste, holds on to how it all feels before it probably goes to shit. 

Except when the gash is revealed, Roy doesn’t really react — at least not in any way that’s consequential, not in any way noticeable, not even at this distance, and fuck. If Ed thinks that all his painfully unexperienced reactions have been sufficiently embarrassing so far, there’s nothing comparable to the sound that escapes his mouth when Mustang — still breathing heavily, still too close to his face — slowly brings his bleeding palm up to his own soft lips and covers the oozing cut with his warm tongue, closing his mouth around the wound, engulfing it with a slight suction. 

It’s something like the lovechild born from a delirious moan and a defensive grunt, meeting up with the one from a pained whimper and a choked cry, all coming together to make him sound like a dying animal, and still, Roy does not react, nor does he stop his ongoing display of vampiric philia as he goes on with the motion like it’s the most casual little gesture. He feels his teeth graze against his skin, warm and calculating as he avoids directly touching the laceration. His palm trembles. 

Roy eventually parts from his hand and offhandedly smacks his lips, he brings his gaze up to Ed again and stays like that for a second. Contemplating. 

“You bleed so easily,” he almost whispers, gently moving to pull the glove back on his exposed skin, as if completely aloof. “It should stop for now, but you should probably look for a band-aid after this,” he says.

His hand feels damp with Roy’s saliva. 

“You’re so fucking weird.” The phrase whooshes through Ed’s frame and it sounds like a fainted version of him, delivering ghostly messages from the other side and shackled to his own words by all that he can’t bring himself to say at the moment. 

The chastising voices from his mind’s backburner reach out to smack him into the realization of his stupidity. His non-existent resolve. His dissolving roadblock. ‘ _Now you’ve gone and done it,_ ’ he thinks. It’s all rolling hills and boneless knees from here on out, there are so many patches of soft, secluded skin on him, untouched and buried. Perpetual bruises hidden in the dark. Hermits that get coaxed into the open with the simple snap from a certain someone’s fingers. Places he thought were safe. 

And it doesn’t feel that bad. And maybe it should. 

“Hm.” He smiles. “Is that a turn-off?” he asks Ed, like he isn’t caving in on himself, wandering about a boundless, blackened sea of sensations he never knew could be felt. 

“I have no idea,” Ed lets go of a shaky sigh while curling his right hand into a weak fist in his lap, back to safety. 

Back to reason. 

He hates that he can’t look anywhere else but straight at the eternal voids Roy has for eyes. He hates that he’s already slipped into them. 

He sees himself talking to him in practically all of Kimblee’s classes for the last few weeks. 

He sees his note. The way he holds a pencil between two fingers sometimes and lazily taps it’s eraser against the top of his seat in a rhythmic thud. He sees him walking at his side in the hall. His sleepy smile out in the wind, outside the movie theater. 

He feels something like it’d been a long time coming, but he still doesn’t fully grasp the sense of it. Because Mustang has an all-knowing mouth and Ed’s also kissing all the people whom he’s come in contact with tonight. 

He obtusely wonders if all those other girls felt the same way he does. If they all have nasty scars that have never been touched outside of latex gloves, ruined parchments that only ever smell of soap and antiseptic, as per official recommendations to keep it from infecting. 

He looks down at his lap, his secretly wet hand, his fluttering fingers. This is what being suspended in a vacuum feels like. 

Mustang quirks his head to the side in order to catch his gaze within his, searching, unclouded darkness. A clear night’s sky. 

Fresh air. 

“Everything okay?” he asks, tone unreadable. They’re still too close. 

The distinct murmur of scalding tears begins it’s prodding at the back of his eyes, his throat tightens. He’s fucking ruined. 

Several loud thuds bang against the door and rattles them both out of whatever moment there was, living out its sizzling time in the static air particles around them and both snap their heads in the direction of the door. They’re accompanied by a growing aura of urgent screaming and a muffled commotion in the distance. 

“ _Yo everyone get out someone fucking narc’d on us!_ ” an undistinguished male voice pitches from the other side, which gives the indistinct sound of running feet a lot more meaning. 

Roy turns his head back to Ed, hands still at his sides. “I suppose that’s our cue,” he slurs amusedly. 

Ed doesn’t need to be told twice. He pushes Roy off himself and slides to the floor with a hissed string of his own curses. Going for the door, he suddenly stops dead in his tracks which causes Roy to sort of stumble into his back. 

“Should — should someone wake them?” He points towards the passed out lovebirds in the tub. 

“They’re on cloud nine,” Roy too easily answers, to which Ed groans, turning his gaze between the door and the bathroom in growing desperation. 

“Fuck it,” he finally resolves, grabbing the knob and turning the lock in one movement to swing it open. The air is filled with acute paranoia and adolescent despair as people run straight past them coming from the stairs, they’re probably going for the room’s windows while throwing their half-filled cups of tonic on the lavish carpets. He hears glass breaking in the distance and people pulling each other in all directions. 

Roy’s hands are back at his shoulder, pushing him forward and his entire chest is burning as they start making their way around the electric frenzy. Some of them are laughing while they stumble past. 

There’s a growing pebble of disquiet in his stomach, it’s making its way to the top of his windpipe when his feet stop moving under him and Roy stumbles past, stopping short a few steps ahead of and looking back with a concerned look on his face. 

Ed has often been told that he’s quite shitty at hiding some emotions, which overall sucks for him, except when he urgently needs another person to fucking empathize with his goals. 

“What?” Roy asks, eyes widening in earnest. 

Ed bites his inner lip, he pinches his eyebrows together, he shakes his head. 

He despises himself. 

“Man — _fuck!_ ” He resolves after a few seconds of scouring his mind for the right answer and coming up with nothing, he doesn’t care if stomping his foot is childish because his body pulls him to turn back towards the bathroom in a flash. He runs and stumbles to kneel next to the tub and the next thing he knows he’s attacking whatever body parts he can get his hands on, shaking them awake like an H-bomb is two minutes away from dropping and they gotta go fight their way into a limited bunker downstairs, effective immediate. 

“Hey — hey! Wake the hell up,” he shouts at them, except the one with the foot-imprint is resolute in his state of unconsciousness. “Yo!” he exclaims, quickly debating the moral quandaries of slapping someone’s face while they’re already in such a vulnerable state. 

Suddenly there’s a pair of arms coming into the bathtub and encompassing the guy’s limp shoulders, pulling him upright with an impressive amount of strength. He looks up to see Mustang’s at his side, features drawn in close concentration as he manhandles him out. He jerks his head in Ed’s direction while maneuvering an arm around his shoulder. 

“You help her out, neither of them are waking up before nine a.m.,” he says, and Ed nods, getting busy with a chick in a tangled red ponytail with her chin rested against her chest plate; she doesn’t look too heavy, but a breath of relief still washes over him when she jostles and croaks something inaudible under her breath after Ed brings his arm around her shoulders. 

“Hey, we gotta go, can you stand?” is all he says to her.

“Mmm — _fuck,_ Mom, you’re so annoying,” she drawls out without quite opening her eyes. 

He hears Roy snort behind him — Roy, who’s somehow already managed to piggyback an entire unconscious person without much apparent effort. _Athletes._

“Right,” Ed breathes, because, again, terminology battles are never-ending and this is not the time or place. “Y-yeah, but you need to get up, alright? Can you do it?”

She groans in response, but it’s good enough. They stagger their way out to the hall with a person each, the girl is just about Ed’s height, which is neither good or bad, obviously, but just happens to come in handy when supporting her through to a room at the end of the hallway. Red and blue lights flash through the house like it’s walls are paper-thin. Shit starts getting real. 

They reach an open window that leads to the back of the house. 

“We have to slide down,” Roy informs him, to which Ed does not object, because any and all encounters with local police constitute a major hazard that he’d rather die trying to get away from. 

He pokes his head out to see a 110 angle rooftop that thankfully isn’t decorated with any of those protuberant ceramic tiles. There are people already landing on the back and running out into the night, howling, cursing at the authorities. 

The night’s windy and uncertain. The people clinging to them probably about to make a death-jump without their cognition and the maneuvering needed to get it right is near acrobatic. None of it comes to mind once the gal at his side delivers a swift curtain of unexplained warmth that drapes itself all over his side as she promptly wretches all over him. The smell invades him with acute aggression, Mustang’s eyes are wide and his entire frame pauses, he has a leg already dangling outside of the window frame as the guy on his back remains dead to the world. 

Ed looks at an indefinite point further out the window, throwing his mind out into the treetops he sees ahead. Living in the moment is fucking overrated when your sweater sticks to you through the moisture of someone’s puke and you hear the pressing sound of police sirens grow in the distance. 

He sees Mustang try to clamp down a growing chuckle. 

*

It’s nearing midnight. 

Some crickets have survived out in the concrete, and if he concentrates hard enough, he can hear them sing in perfect unison, just beyond the edges of his stale soundscape. 

He lays curled to his side, rumpled sheets loosely pooling around his frame. The house contracts around the dropping temperatures, but other than that it’s immersed in silence. It’s been like this for an undefined period of time. 

Evie wasted no time getting on him about that found footage that’s made its way around the teen barracks like gunpowder, otherwise known as the inevitable social cost of what happened Friday night. The permanent record. She devoured the video and pounced on his weakness merely hours after the first rays of sunshine had found their way through the grimy windows on the house. He focused on how they reflected on the colored milk that sloshed around the remaining pieces of lucky charms inside their cracked porcelain bowls. 

“ _If I’d known you were into guys who fucking beat you_ ,” she snorted, then cackled, but not before snitching on him to Dante, as it almost goes without saying. 

They sat around him at the kitchen table during an impromptu “family” reunion slash intervention to his uncovered, irredeemable homosexuality, slash public shaming as a cautionary tale for the rest. 

Winston nearly expelled half his instant Nesquik through the nose before screeching his disbelief, “ _You’re gay?!_ ”

Sloan muttered something amongst the lines of “ _That’s fuckin’ disgusting_ ,” while Selim, that 19th-century schoolboy-outfit-wearing little creep, huffed, “ _And it’s actually a sin, in case you didn’t know_.”

He shifted amidst the goosebumps that erupted at the base of his neck and went all the way down to his tailbone and distantly hoped Roy didn’t feel this fucking embarrassed about having done what they did. 

What they did… 

Luisa yawned slightly, while silently flicking her nails and fixing her eyes on the edge of their ratty couch, and Dante… Wasn’t happy. 

Serving his time in forced confinement hasn’t been all that hard, truth be told. And being made an example of in front of the others also isn’t something that he’s not used to. Thrown into his room with a rosary tossed at his face and a shabby copy of the New Testament, stupid as it may be, is also pretty standard treatment. 

The first time it happened, he was thirteen and had barely two weeks of living under this roof. He’d dropped a glass of apple juice and said the ‘f’ word. Repeatedly. 

He can do a verbatim recount of Colossians 3:25 since that day, which according to his new foster mother, also had the benefit of helping expand his unfortunate hillbilly vocabulary. He was invested in reading it out loud with his front against the closed door, so she could hear that he was saying every word and correct his pronunciation with bone-chilling inflection. “ _Speak correctly, Edward, lest you need your jaw re-arranged,_ ” she’d said. 

He wanted to bang his head against the door and see what happened first — him passing out or the wood cracking. He didn’t. He was small and didn’t have more than a handbag worth of material belongings to his name. Colored pencils, a couple of shirts, a folded postcard from Somerset County in Maine he never remembered getting. It's faded — the colors on printed paper have lost their initial gloss, the fields and plantations depicted are greyed over with time, withered with the fact that no words or dedications were ever written on it’s back. No stamp was ever licked into its little box. It’s fine — he doesn’t even remember the damn place for something other than a moving blob of pale colors. 

He would’ve had a family picture or two to add to the list of things labeled with his name at the home. “Ed’s sack of sad shit”, if any of those had survived the fire, that is. He only remembers one with a man — white, middle-aged, sturdy hands, as blonde as him. Holding him up as if he weighed an entire mountain. 

He didn’t feel as though he actually missed that one. 

He recited the words from the book on his lap until he ran out of spit and his stomach’s growling became incessant. She unlocked his door a little past midnight and let him walk down the darkened house to have a peanut butter and honey sandwich, two glasses of water, and sent him back to bed. The next day, he woke up to find that the words, “ _Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry. On account of these the wrath of God is coming,_ ” were engraved into his mind for good. 

This time around it was Romans, 12:17. He did as told and hoped it’d be the end of it. But even now, more than forty-plus hours into his punishment and without having left his respectable chambers, he feels it’s far from over. That woman always wears long sleeves, after all. But he does it as he’s told. He won’t talk back and he tells himself it’s not because he doesn’t have it in him anymore. Of course not. 

He pulls the scratchy covers over himself, deciding his prickling skin is actually getting cold. 

The zolpidem is definitely taking its sweet time kicking in. The one he pushed into himself with resolve like no other. Found in the baggie kept beneath his mattress, same as always. He wasn’t sure there was any left at this point, but lo and behold, 10mgs of sleeping aid heard his prayers. How hilarious is that?

Next thing he knew, there was a white oval-shaped pill in his hand, falling with giddy excitement, dry swallowed easily enough once he cut it in half with a single bite. The bitter aftertaste is all gravy, the way it’s jagged, powdery ends catch against your tonsils is background static. 

That was the last of his stash. 

Meanwhile, he wishes to convince himself that he remembers nothing, in the hopes that his stomach will stop turning and he might get some fucking sleep. Nothing — not the cut on his hand, not the way Roy chews while talking but somehow doesn’t make it gross, not the fact that apparently, as he heard through the grapevine, someone called the firemen for some fucking reason and then they, in turn, called the cops and the entire show collapsed on them. 

Not the fact that the fall hurt his knee, real fucking bad.

He pretends not to remember how Roy held his hand to try to help him up and into the darkness that extended at the back of the house when they unsteadily landed on the ground, even as he was covered in someone else’s dinner. He pretends he doesn’t recall pulling out of his grasp, out of fear, out of shame, out of something like acute paranoia. 

He soon bumped into Winry in between all the running and he wanted to hug her with all his heart, to bury himself on her soft shoulder, but wouldn’t make her go through the ordeal of having vomit smeared onto her pristine clothes. 

The forest keeps dampening his thoughts. The way they made their way through a section of the woods along with some other scattering kids who were using the integrated lamps on their phones to run off. How he stopped every few meters to try and scrape himself clean against a tree before continuing their fugitive jogging. How he threw himself into a patch of obscure grass, at some point, and rolled around in it after discarding his ruined hoodie somewhere prior. 

How Winry waited for him and helped him get up and rubbed his hand and forearm through the incessant cold amidst strained laughter and hissed swearing. 

How he arrived at the house covered in mud, inching his way upstairs on all fours. 

He pretends his leg wasn’t killing him and his heart wasn’t hammering out of his chest for the second time that evening. 

He pretends it isn’t bursting out of him right now with leftover adrenaline that comes out through his every pore like scorching acid. 

He acts like Ling’s text messages never reached him, even now, as he stares intently at the shining, burst pixels on his phone’s screen, at the oversaturated colors, at the white little letters that spell out, 

‘ _You absolute man eater! How tf did I miss this??? It’s too bad you’re not on insta, y’all are the thirst item of the year_ ,’ followed by an overheated face emoji, followed by the one of many droplets, followed by Ed’s sinking dread. He wishes Dante had confiscated his phone, too. 

His hand trembles as his thumb presses down on the ‘play’ button — again. 

He sees himself through the shaky eyes of a drunken camera, cross-legged on a carpet floor, lost to himself, his face half obscured by someone else’s. Stunned, dumb, infatuated. 

How he wishes his bed was a coffin. Muddy quicksand. The feeble audio of cheering people fills his darkened room as he curls in further on himself. His joints feel raw. 

There’s something distinctly awful about not being able to look away, not being able to fucking sleep without seeing it happen all over again. He sees himself come apart, push himself off the ground and stumble outside of the video’s punishing frame. 

Roy smiles charmingly at the crowd, he rolls his eyes as they mock him through stifled laughter, he drinks before getting up himself. “ _Great job,_ ” He says to someone. And there’s something truly horrifying about how attractive he is at any angle. 

Ed doesn’t know what to do with the warmth the image still produces in him, the way it travels down his body. Stinging. He slides the player back a few seconds. 

The way he sits with his hands spread behind him, the way he swirls a cup’s contents and lets the beverage sit in his mouth for just a second before swallowing. His Adam’s apple bobs, a defined punctuation mark. He repeats that section for the umpteenth time. He looks and keeps looking no matter how bad he wants to stop. 

He doesn’t know how many times he’s seen it, holding his phone over his face, letting himself sink into an endless loop. Torture. Except it doesn’t feel real. 

Sundays are awful. 

His battery runs out. He opens his hand and lets the phone fall into his face; he deserves the blow. 

The crickets intensify in the distance. He swallows the lump in his throat. It tastes of Ambien. 

*

He walked into school like death warmed over. Looking. Feeling. His gaze firmly fixed on the floor as he passed through busy halls. His mouth is obstinately dry. 

“ _You look like shit_ ,” Winry told him that morning as he threw his bag into the back seat of the car while climbing into the front next to her, trying his best to keep his muscles tense in order to counter the incessant shaking he’d woken up to. An annoying tingle that seemed to come into existence with the sole purpose of reminding him of all the wrong wires. At least he was out of the house. A real pain in the ass for foster caregivers is sustained school-absences, so after Greg's prime example, none of them are allowed to not show up, and god forbid they get actually sick because that's the type of thing that triumphantly falls under the category of what Dante'd call a ' _you problem'_. 

“The ponytail’s nice, though,” she added, pointing at his hurried hairdo. When she asked how the rest of his weekend went, he shrugged and said, 

“Pretty boring,” Which wasn’t technically a lie, “Yours?”

“Weird,” she chuckled, “I was, um, kinda texting with Ling a lot? I don’t know, he’s pretty kooky so maybe I should regret giving him my number. He’s also kind of entertaining, though, he’s got some wild stories, that’s for sure.” 

“He’s really into you,” Ed said. 

“Duh,” Winry answered while flicking on her turn signal on a stop. “His wooing is one of the most transparent I’ve ever come to encounter, like, okay, he kept asking what I drank and I said something like ‘passion fruit nectar with aged Caribbean rum and a tiny hint of triple-sec’—” Ed snorts halfheartedly, summoning the image of Winry opening a bottle of ice-cold Budweiser with her canines, “And he just said ‘That can be arranged’!” She laughs. “But I dunno, I guess it’s nice for a guy to be so honest about what he’s doing.” 

“He told me he’s got a sweet forest cabin somewhere,” Ed said, “Maybe you oughta go check that out before judging him.” She laughed and punched his shoulder and he tried to laugh, too. 

She didn’t bring the video up. 

It’s nearing midday and he’s never been more thankful for the existence of free periods, as both a manufactured concept and an application to daily school life. He couldn’t keep himself upright in a chair for another second if there was a gun to his head, and the fact that he’s actually hungry today makes the empty cafeteria one of the biggest blessings ever bestowed upon him. 

Eating alone is an uncontested pleasure because his habits do speak of someone who never had to put the table for daily family dinners, or a dad who snapped at him for propping his elbows up on the table. He feels valedictorian; someone who just spent the entire weekend eating by himself on the floor of his room while he saw the light change through his window, only being let out when he asked to go piss — and only when his voice began leaning into that tone adjacent to earnest begging — and now gets to keep his quiet for a while longer. 

He took a five-milligram prolonged-release tablet two entire days ago, now. The absence is meeting up with the afterglow from his sleeping pill and he might be a few seconds away from slumping face-first onto the floor and have that be the end of it — which is why eating has to be a primary focus, not staring at cloudy windows during class hours, not lying awake at night crying in hopeless fascination. 

They start serving their boiled diced carrots and meatball sandwiches about an hour and a half before the bells ring, but Ed only takes a tray as an excuse to ask for two sunny-d singles, a packet of saltines and a shitload of fries, which the lunch lady is sure to serve with an unscathed side of silent judgment about his dietary choices. It’s really not his fault he gets about a third of his overall caloric intake from free school lunches thanks to the ebt card that says, ‘ _Hey, I’m shit poor and parentless; take the anti-right wing road here and feed me_ ’. 

“Just a bit more,” he keeps telling the lady as she digs the plastic scoop back into the bundle of golden frizzled marvels. She quirks an eyebrow at him after the third time he hesitantly asks for an added portion, to which he answers with a smile. 

His entire body is imploring he drops dead. 

The lights are still too bright because the day is overcast and blinding white, his hands haven’t completely stopped trembling and he hears “Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God”. He’s learned his lesson. 

He’s never going out again. 

He walks away from the register and lets the book held between his arm and ribcage fall onto the nearest table he finds. He settles on the squeaky blue bench bolted to the floor by swinging both legs in and gets busy with reading up on acid and enzymatic hydrolysis for substrate for microbial processes, not because he’s absorbing any new information, mind, but he’s at the point where any and all distractions are very welcome. Plus he’s got a test closing in. 

Yeah, that too. 

Anyway — hydrolysis is a touchy subject. He aggressively skims through the lactose configuration and forces himself to get angry at the fact that compositions as cool as maltose and galactose can even be within the same ballpark as the milk sugar disaccharide from hell, but his indignation doesn’t feel as genuine as it has before. He should get back on ritalin, that’s when his concentration could go on for days on end and he’d live in between encyclopedia pages. 

Because his brain is permanently broken and there’s a whole ass section of it there that’s resolutely giving him the silent treatment. Buzzing with irritated dormancy. 

His limbs sway with unrest — upset about having to keep still, too sickened to keep moving. He might be coming down with something. 

He keeps absentmindedly paging through the book while his teeth go for the plastic straw stuck to the aluminum pack and rip it lose. He proceeds to tear it free from its wrapper and distractedly blows the remaining piece of plastic out of his lips — something he wouldn’t do in front of anyone. The cold sweetness settles something in his chest as it travels down. 

The aches are taken care of for the time being, so he can let himself hope it rains later, hope it helps wash out some of the dirt on the sidewalks. He’ll call it a good day if he can make it out without Winry questioning him about what she saw on the deadly internet — or Ling’s slippery arms coming around him or Izumi bearing down on the fact that “he’s dragging his feet weird” or just running into anyone in general. Anyone at all. 

“Nutritious,” comes a deep voice from above. His. The haunting spirit of self-fulfilled prophecies. He barely manages to dig himself forward to counter the inertia that almost pushes him off the bench as Roy comes to sit across from him, tossing a duffel bag at his side and settling his cheek on a closed fist. 

“W — um, what?” he sputters, but Roy’s already batting his other hand in the air, cheerily adjusting himself. 

“I’m glad to see you’re alive and well after all the commotion. Getting that dynamic duo down was a challenge, huh?” He chuckles, “Also, Heymans Breda just told me some people managed to set a pool table ablaze and that’s what started the whole thing, someone should’ve told those firemen that underage drinking is certainly _not_ within their jurisdiction, though.” He sighs, “Anyhow, it seems you found your way out of the woods — literally.” 

He looks too fucking fresh and cheery for someone who spent most of Saturday’s crack of dawn proving to the world that he does not have a kidney to worry about — one loaded drink at a time. Organ failure? Alcoholic congestion? Who are these people? Never heard of ‘em.

Ed works his words around his mouth, trying to process everything at an acceptable rate. “Yeah, um.” He swallows while closing the book’s cover over his right hand — the better to keep the page, of course. “We just went over to the adjacent avenue and walked from there,” he says, reeling in all his maximum politeness as the bare minimum he can do to salvage some of his dignity after that great assemblage of a pandemonium that went down two nights before. After he ran away like a little kid. 

He focuses on breathing. 

“You walked?” Roy asks, leaning forward on crossed forearms. Ed steels himself. _Walked. Trotted. Scampered through the night covered in bile and fell on my face more than once even though I didn’t have the excuse of alcohol._

“Well busses around here don’t have a 24-hour system, it ain’t a cosmopolitan city,” he clips instead. His head pounds. 

Roy chuckles, “I suppose it isn’t — since it’s not really a city to begin with.” 

“It’s an overgrown pothole,” he spits, something in his neck is heating and he decides to look away, but he doesn’t do it fast enough to elude the way Roy’s smirk grows as he shakes his head. 

“It’s actually a government-controlled simulation, I’ve heard the cafeteria staff have got cameras on their aprons,” he says while looking past Ed. “That’s why you only ever see their fronts; it might be the second coming of Big Brother.”

Ed begins speed-sorting through the limited knowledge he has of reality tv shows, based on what that one night-shift nurse used to syntonize on the beat-up portable TV atop the desk while she filed her nails. He listened keenly to all the drama but it barely did anything to take his mind off the corroding discomfort that kept him up almost every night. He focused on their batshit dialogue to drown out the sound of his forceful, wheezing, aided breath. The periodical deflating of the oxygen regulator hooked to him. Some things eventually stuck. 

“I would’ve been kicked out already,” he snorts without much delay and takes a drag of orange juice. A long one. He ventures his eyes off the tabletop for a moment. 

Roy slightly squints at him while carding an idle tongue through his lips, and — okay, looking up is something he'd definitely call a mistake. _Fuck_ this guy. 

He hums, “I wouldn’t be so sure, you’ve got some charisma on your side.”

There’s really nothing he can think of to retort so he decides to press his tongue against the back of his mouth, holding on to himself. Hoping Roy’s intentions become clear sometime soon. 

“Anyhow,” he sighs dramatically after a moment, “I’ve learned my lesson; tequila does not go well with any artificial flavoring.”

Ed shifts. “I’m surprised you even remember what you had,” he mumbles, hoping it doesn’t sound too judgemental, because what the fuck. 

Roy looks up at a superior right corner as if pondering his answer. “I’ll admit there was a bit of a total blackout in the period between 12 and 4 am, give or take,” he says while moving to intertwine his fingers on the table’s surface, because he thinks himself all graceful and shit. 

Ed swallows, his spit feels heavy.

He clears his throat, or attempts to, anyway. “S-so, what. You don’t remember anything?” he asks dumbly. His right hand slightly clenches under his book’s cover, his legs keep involuntarily trembling. 

Roy chortles and shrugs nonchalantly. “I remember kissing _you_ — on more than one occasion, actually. So I couldn’t have been that out of it if, don’t you think?” 

It’s not Ed’s fault that his throat contracts around synthetic liquid orange that’s 90% sugar anyway. It’s just sticky like that. 

It makes people choke — naturally, there must be statistical analyses on the number of nationwide deaths caused by drinking things like V8 through a straw. 

When his voice comes back he manages a mildly convincing deadpan. “Great.” 

He places the squishy juice pack to the side in order to not be tempted to burst the shit out of the thing with his death grip. 

He can practically hear Roy’s grin.

“Yeah, it was,” he answers. 

“Okay,” Ed breathes. The juice still whispers in his windpipe, it implores him to throw up. 

“ _Just_ okay?” Roy says. “Well…, I can live with that, I guess,” he resolves after a brief moment of contemplation. “It certainly leaves room for improvement.” 

Hell. His face is about to peel off. Thermal injury. 

“After all,” he goes on, “It’s not my intention to deny all charges; I was intoxicated.” He smiles, “Which is why I firmly believe my performance didn’t speak of a usual standard.” 

Ed allows himself one cough. One. It inevitably turns into a dying sort of wheeze he’s able to clip back only by the work of a miracle. 

“Are —” He looks around the still mostly empty cafeteria. “Are you skipping class right now?” he asks, rather stupidly. Fuck. He looks at his knees. This is unsubtle digressing 101. Self-taught. 

“Why, are you?” Roy retorts, smile unfaltering. 

Ed shakes his head. 

“Technically me neither, there’s a real perk to basketball practice being held during the same hours as History, sometimes,” he answers. “It’s a shame really, but what are you gonna do?” 

“Didn’t you play football?” Ed pushes on, plummeting past his current dizziness. He should get some more sustenance in him. He’s having a Twin Peaks experience. He might be about to wake up again and realize none of this actually happened. 

“A bit of both.” He shrugs. “You could come watch one day, if you like. In fact, you seem to be free at the moment.” 

“I’m — maltose. I mean! It’s — I need to catch up on this,” he pats the cover of the book on his hand. “But thanks. I’m not really into sports so I prob’ly wouldn’t get it,” he goes on while burying his hand in the pile of fries and pushing them into his mouth. 

“There’s really not much to get,” Roy answers. 

“Then why’re people so obshesed with it?” he says around a mouthful, manners be damned. He chews with fervor, his molars might crack. 

Roy smirks, “It serves as a great distraction from existential terror?” 

Ed swallows forcibly. “No shit?” he says while going for a ketchup packet, only shaking a tiny bit as he rips it open with his teeth and pours it over the tray’s corner. He knows eating straight from these things is a nasty thing to do, but what else can be expected from him under such a scrutinizing gaze and so little time to get his shit together. “Does the rest of the team feel that way, too?” 

Roy chuckles, “I’d say they don’t. And that you shouldn’t repeat such slander near any pep rallies.”

“I don’t do pep rallies,” Ed chews, salt nicely exploding in his mouth, it stings at where he bit his lip. 

“You should,” Roy gushes. “They’re loud and deadly,“

“You know, you’re —” Ed swallows down another portion of his mushed fries, “You’re real weird for a jock,” he muffles. He doesn’t know how the conversation ended here, but it doesn’t seem to matter as Roy lets out an unrestrained string of laughter at that, joyous, uncompromised. It resonates through the room. 

“And you’re just as strange as I expected,” he says.

Ed’s thigh suddenly jerks under the table with a flash of dull pain. It’s fast enough that he can ignore it, but not so much that it doesn’t mean he shouldn’t start planning ahead… He makes a mental rundown of his personal inventory. Zero. 

It’s getting colder because of the time of year and he might be coming down with something. A little extra will go a long way. 

Just a little. 

“Glad to please,” he broods. His head pounds. It’s probably the flu. 

“I didn’t mean that as criticism,” Roy immediately smooths in a steady voice. 

Ed flicks his gaze over to the face in front of him before settling for the place where the collar of his shirt meets with the pale flesh on his neck. He decides it looked honest enough. 

“I — I didn’t either,” he replies after a moment. 

And then the air between them settles like a sigh, then — not a tired one. He straightens his neck enough to finally peel his gaze off of the crumb filled front of his jacket and look up to where Mustang’s eyes flicker with an emotion he can’t quite place, just sit quietly in the unspoken knowledge that it might not be something all that bad. He’s had this feeling before, of being on the same implicit page — of looking at each other through that tacit agreement of having found themselves in the exact same place, wandering. 

Roy slightly parts his lips after a second, momentarily dissolving the gentle smile that pulled at the corners of his mouth. 

“Anyway…,” he starts, voice significantly tamer, a gleam of hesitance shines through. “I think I’d,” he starts but cuts himself off, he leans further onto his elbows and licks his lips while looking down, “I would, um, very much like the opportunity to redeem myself,” he drawls. “You know, since you’ve had to carry the burden of knowing what a terrible drunk-kisser I am, I figure you might as well be entitled to a proper apology,” he concludes, lifting his gaze but not his face. 

And alright, if Roy thinks that _that_ was terrible, Ed… Doesn’t want to know what the real deal is like. He truly, honest-to-the-Christian-God doesn’t. He’d like to keep what little of his maladjusted life is left and not have his soul sucked out through the sheer force of an experience he knows he isn’t ready for. Nu-uh. No fucking way. 

“Apology?” his idiotic mouth says anyway, unscripted and without any damn permission. No clearance whatsoever. 

Roy’s lax smile returns, “I mean, should you want that, obviously. I don’t mean to come off as forceful after — ”

“Do you always fucking talk like that?” Ed cuts in. 

Roy blinks, surprised, “Like what?”

“I dunno, like — like you’re about to kick me out of your snobby book club for saying Moby Dick is all about apocryphal whale facts.”

All of his teeth are perfect, they shine with uncontested amusement as Roy smile goes a tad lopsided, “You’ve been kicked out of— “

Ed groans, “Just forget it, I’ll assume the answer’s yes.” 

“It might be,” Roy says. “I’m sorry about that.” He isn’t. 

“Whatever,” Ed brings his left palm down to swipe it clean from fry-grease over his jeans. “Like…, If — if you’re saying you wanna do it again, I’m down, so… ” He takes an unsteady breath. 

His heart is as a jackhammer on amphetamines, and God, it hurts to be alive. 

He can’t look. He can’t witness his life fall apart, not today at least. There’s been enough of that already going around people’s snickering phones, whispered behind his back, placed in front of Dante’s judgemental eyes as she curls her lip in disgust and sentences him to prayer, he doesn’t really need for Roy to finish him off — even if Ed is asking for it, with his calloused-ass sense of tact and skewed concept of flirting. He’s just never had to do this before. High school was only supposed to be about getting the diploma. An in-and-out deal, but the seat under him flexes as Roy shifts to stand and rounds the table to come sit right next to him, one leg on either side of the bench. The warmth of his proximity hits him like an avalanche. 

He suppresses another shiver. 

He feels like shit; but also not. 

“So?” Roy asks. Ed looks at him, he gets looked at right back. 

A fever is definitely creeping itself up his torso like someone running their careless finger up and down a tail piano — a loud one. Or maybe this is what people mean when they say the word ‘lovestruck’ like it’s the pest. 

His mind offers a singing choir of his foster family jeering at his very existence — and fuck, he just wants to make out with a guy. That’s just too bad. 

Ed lets himself size Roy up. “So, what?” 

It’s not a swinging door he didn’t expect, this time. Maybe it’s just the fact that he had too many crawling hours to himself this weekend, too much time to lay on the floor and think and think and think — and worry and doubt and agonize. Feeling Mustang’s hands on him. Realizing at the end that even if this feeling comes with baggage, there’s no getting out of it now. 

Roy’s smile is gentle as he leans in. 

“Wait,” Ed says. “I’ve —” He shifts in his seat and clears his throat once. “I just ate…” he says, looking down at his clusterfuck of a lunch tray. He turns back to see Roy’s smile has widened as he lets out a soft, short-lived breathy chuckle like Ed’s being ridiculous. He is, sorta. But it’s not the scornful type of ‘ _ha-ha, what an idiot you are,_ ’ and he can still get him back for that, later.

You can tell he’s having the time of his life when he ignores Ed and simply goes for it. 

The third time, it’s light. He brings their mouths together but doesn’t press into his, settling at first for brushing his parted lips against Ed’s, swiping them along before leaning further with an easygoing pressure, letting the flare sit in between their joined skins for a moment and grazing his knuckles at Ed’s cheekbone, tracing them down to the corner his jaw. It’s short-lived, simple, PG-13. And if he weren’t sitting down, he would have fucking dropped on his knees already. 

They part and he finds himself smiling cautiously before Roy speaks up. 

“How about that?” 

Ed diverts his gaze, subconsciously looking around them, searching for hateful onlookers, waiting for the blow. He looks back.

“Like I would fuckin’ know,” he tries not laughing. 

Roy pouts very slightly, “One to ten?” 

“What is this, a master chef playoff?” That _is_ how master chef operates, right? 

Roy snorts. “Hey, well, listen, my ego needs this — desperately,” he emphasizes while moving to get back up. He goes for his duffel bag and swings it over his shoulder. Ed hums, biting down on another grin that might come out too loopy. “So I’m guessing if you need another sampler, I’m…, Available — just to abuse the metaphor and all that,” he says. 

“A-ha,”

Roy winks. 

Daggers to his heart. 

“See you around, Ed.” He looks like he’s suppressing a stupid smile of his own before turning on his heel to walk away. Off to baseball practice, or what the hell ever — a sport with a ball and a sea of cheering people. It’s all the same to him, he hates sitting out in the sun for hours. He smiles at the empty room and the forgotten book at his side, still hiding his fist in between its pages. He _hates_ all this traditional romance; the cafeteria's ratty trays; capitalism; the baptist church. 

Maybe Roy gets it, because it turns out he’s pretty okay.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> speak 🔫


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for how delayed this chapter was! I really thought keeping a regular writing schedule would be a doable thing, huh. Warnings for this one include extensive and inappropriate use of pharmaceuticals, The Police Force, and a very brief account of a gory experience. Enjoy!

It’s 6:47 am when he wakes up from a nap that had started at 5 pm the day before. His body jolts around a sudden inhale, like he’d gasped after falling from a great height, slamming head-first into a feeling of deja-vu. 

He looks at himself, draped diagonally over the made bed, fully clothed. Ed groans while rubbing his face against the pillow, noting his sheets could use their monthly laundromat visit. 

This is what happens when they give him Fridays off at work. The big bad blackouts. Entire episodes of life go missing, sucked into a black hole of exhaustion. 

He stops looking at his alarm clock, feeling scolded somehow. He looks at his phone like it’ll tell him something different. It doesn’t: his brain is a compulsive backstabber and blacked out for more than ten consecutive hours. 

He notices the voices emanating from downstairs just as the last of his groggy mind sets itself in place, retrieving some order of cognizance from the depths of unconsciousness. It’s a Saturday, that much is certain. He was with Roy yesterday — a Friday. They talked a bit after school and then he said he was too tired to do anything and walked home and — shit, apparently that last bit was honest, through and through.Too tired to even remember how he got to his room. 

As his legs feel the dull soreness from the merciless weather conditions of the universe, he considers he should have at the very least tried to fold the comforter over his legs right before passing out, because more than ten degrees dropped steadily during the few hours prior to midnight, like they always do, and he wasn’t ready, like he apparently never is. 

Muffled sounds of people talking downstairs grow by the second and it’s too unfamiliar. People. More than two. Sudden waves of unrecognized tones and inflection seem to reach up to him through the floorboards, curling around his ankles and dragging him down to them with a sense of urgency. It’s probably early enough that his sensory data is a bit fucked up, as he might’ve noticed. 

His stomach churns and he scoots himself off the bed. He hears Dante’s ragged voice but it’s more pronounced than usual, more… Aware. Cautious. He takes a minute to find his footing, feeling how the cold and unforgiving leather on his boots has permeated it’s way into the cotton on his socks and his feet feel like icicles.

He turns the knob on his door and carefully slides it forwards with the side pressed to it. From over here he only gets a glimpse at the beginning of the staircase but the sound is clearer. He looks up at the ceiling. There’s a humidity spot that stopped growing sometime around two years ago but never completely disappeared. 

“…Been difficult to manage as you two know, I’ve tried giving the boy some free range but — but it seems he keeps taking me for a complete fool, you see, most of the time…” he hears her say. 

“It has crossed a line I’m afraid, m’am.” A male voice, one he finds vaguely familiar. Slightly hoarse and somewhat eerily chipper. He rubs some grub out of his eye and tries to get moisture going inside his mouth because his tongue feels like sandpaper. 

Dante scoffs, “Lord knows I’ve tried — well I never…, I never thought… Look at me, for Christ’s sake, can’t do an awful lot in my position. You know I’m only doing His good work through givin’ these poor children safe haven, I have been for more than fifteen years.“ Ed wants to gag. He’s seen her put up the poor old Southern Samaritan Granny that’s sweet-as-sugar-despite-the-diabetes Act before, like when first the social worker assigned to his case dropped him off on this very doorstep, almost three years ago. 

Thirteen. He was thirteen and the tips of his hair barely touched his shoulders. He wore a short-sleeved shirt and a pair of blue shorts although it wasn’t really that hot. They’d given him these very thick woolen socks that made him have to really jam his foot into the battered white sneakers he used on the daily, they were so long he had to fold the hem twice over his ankles. 

“ _There are another three kids around your age already living here, isn’t that exciting?_ ” The woman had offered on their way, applying some transparent chapstick to her lips. He hugged his feeble possessions to his chest while shifting uncomfortably in the back seat. 

“Can I put my sweater on now?” he’d asked, the woman sighed as she lightly smacked her mouth, put the cap back on the little stick and turned to face him as far as her seatbelt allowed for it, the leather seatings cracked loudly with her movement and that formal skirt looked too uncomfortable for her to be so bright and shiny. She probably had a one-bedroom Ikea-dream downtown apartment to which she returned every night, to open her freezer and scream herself ragged into the heartless expanse of a void with half a pint of ice cream. 

“Listen, kiddo,” she smiled. “You don’t have to worry about hiding anything here, yeah? This will be your family now, how exciting is that?” she chippered but it only made him squirm even more, turning to look out the window. Kids around his age… Kids around his age were fucking mean in a way he sometimes had a lot of trouble even assimilating. Like hyenas sniffing out his scabs. Cruel. 

To this day he can only get antsy at the occasional sight of gathered twelve-year-olds around his block. 

“Yeah, but…” 

“I know you’re nervous, sweetheart. But they’ll be very nice to you — you’ll see, a month from now you won’t even remember what all the fuss was about.” 

Whatever conversation could have sprouted from that one-sided exchange ended in a parking car; a dusty front porch; a creaking house with chipped varnish and decayed white paint. A place he gingerly walked into after denying the service worker’s altruistic hand because moving on his own held too much meaning after being impaired and impotent for so long. He was enthusiastically advised to go explore the grounds while Dante — a benign enough looking woman that offered him a tight-lipped smile with laced fingers on her lap — went over some paperwork with the corresponding agents of the state. He shook his head again and instead settled for sitting on one of the kitchen’s stools; all dangling legs and eavesdropping curiosity as he opened his ears to terms like “incapacitated child”, “exceptional academic achievements” and “eligibility for enhanced maintenance payments”.

His eyes wandered up towards the second floor just in time to catch a glimpse of flying black hair and a door suddenly closing on some darkened, hostile eyes. 

The social worker had crouched down for a goodbye hug that felt genuine enough, he crudely tensed and stepped away from her arms, refusing to look at her in the hopes that it’d make it easier that way. Cut the cord. It wasn’t a good idea to get so attached to a person just for giving him a plastic-wrapped sandwich and a candy bar and absentmindedly petting his hair while guiding him out of his dorm room and into his new life. It wasn’t a good idea to lean into that touch like a starved dog. 

Soon after, the sun was setting across a chalky living room, leaving streaks of elongated shadows stretching on the floor. This time of day reminded him of something — someplace. 

“What does that shirt of yours mean?” Dante had inquired once it was just the two of them. 

He looked down at himself after Dante’s question, to the yellow ‘ _Grave Digger Monster Truck_ ’ print on his chest. He shrugged. “They gave it to me…” Random items of clothing sorted by size and assigned to each kid every three months. Donations from the booming industry of orphanage tourism. 

He suppressed the need his breath had to catch on itself as Dante raised an inspecting eyebrow at him — at first tainted with some form of amusement, later on just plain disdainful. He swallowed the knot of acid lodged at the middle of his throat, propelled by the ticking silence of this dusty home. His home, now. 

“Well, the first thing you ought to learn is that we all keep ourselves very righteous in this house. Now I don’t know how much you’ve learned of desecration before — do you know what that word means? Desecration?”

He sniffed and shook his head. He’d already resolved that he wouldn’t cry. He wouldn’t. 

“That’s alright for now, child,” she said, ever the charitable woman with an ominously fluctuating voice. “You’ll learn.”

It’s a lot like what he’s hearing right now. She’s probably clutching her necklace while speaking. He doesn’t know what makes him inch out of his bedroom and towards the stairs but once he makes it to the beginning (or end, depending on who’s asking) of them, he slightly leans on the railings and gets undeniable clarity on the conversation below. 

“…On vandalism, petty theft, what other — my partner here’s got a full damn list already for just two months of complaints and let me tell you, the whole precinct’s about had it with this punk, he — ah, drug distribution, joyriding—”

“Please, please, officers,” Dante’s wavering voice cuts in. Ed’s entire frame sears in dry cold as the previous voice falls into place. 

Bradley. 

The only one who drags his ‘s kind of the way Lyndon B Johnson did, from the information gathered on that one occasion a substitute teacher simply played them an hour of a speech about Vietnam from 1965 on the projector. The point is, it carries that same level of certain annihilation. 

“I am fully aware of my shortcomings as a carer in this — this calamity of a situation, and I want it shown that we will all be cooperating with the authorities here, it’s —”

Ed hears the crack just in time, too. Probably a fracture in some part of the banister, he looks at the way he was precariously leaning against the railing and takes a second to think of how fucked he is as the sound echoes through the house with unmistakable force. 

He freezes. 

“Who’s there?” Dante calls out. He hears heavy footsteps pounding against the floor. Rubber soles. 

Throwing himself head-first into the situation feels eerily literal as he leans further to poke his head out into the staircase, he clears his throat and wants to punch himself for how shaky it fucking comes out. Instead, he presses his eyelids shut. 

“It… Um…” He licks his lips. Dry, dry, dry. 

“Edward,” Dante says. The call of death. The sole apocalypse rider.

“Yeah,” he exhales, turning himself in.

The silence that follows makes the marching trail of the ants curling at the edge of the roof deafening. He hears her wheels, her breath. He waits.

“Come down here, would you?” she finally says, and the forced docility in her tenor comes up like a sickened tentacle and wraps itself around his neck and pulls him down to drown on a glass of iced tea so fucking sweet it’ll trap him like a fruit fly in honey. 

But we all gotta die someday, right? 

He lets out a shaky breath and starts moving, not too excited about the prospect of dragging this out or making a run for it and throwing himself through a window. Emily Rose style. 

He starts walking downstairs making sure the thick soles on his shoes hit every single step as he drops his weight on every notch. Maybe the noise of it will keep his mind from racing or drown out his crazy conjectures. 

He gets low enough, past the line on the roof that reveals amplifying parts of people’s bodies. People in blue uniforms, combat boots, hairy forearms, black gloves. One of their hands comes up to silence the transmission that’s crackling out of the radio clipped to their shoulder. Their gear is so over the top it feels as if the house were a mine excavation site and he was nothing more than thin rubble getting in the way of their sharpened picks. 

Six eyeballs follow his every move as he finally arrives downstairs and feels the oppressive energy emanating from their broad stances crush his frame. It’s as if the oxygen availability was just reduced to a quarter. 

“So this is the little prodigy,” Bradley speaks. Indeed, he’s like the hitman in a seventies porno — eye-patch and all. He hopes his thoughts aren’t of the loud type. 

Perhaps it’s just his skewed perception, but the man’s voice seems unnecessarily loud. His thick mustache dips with a rather unsettling smile. _Little my ass_ , he wants to say, but instead looks at his stretchable baton.

“Yes he’ll be graduating high school at fifteen,” Dante says from where she’s sitting, just a little behind the two officers. “Very proud of him, we are,” she inclines her head and gives him a look from over her reading glasses. Bradley’s partner scoffs. 

“So you’ll be a college freshman by, what, sixteen?” he asks while looking around the living room with a neutrally scrutinizing gaze, casually flexing his obvious power. Ed guesses he’s not particularly interested in the answer, seeing as his condescending tone already reflects his disdain, but he nods anyway. Bradley sighs and takes a few steps forward. It takes too much effort for him not to jump two feet in the air because everything about these fucking men spells ‘overkill’. 

They’re the types of officers to treat a speeding ticket like a national threat, the kind they live frustrated has never actually crossed their path. Police academies must be plagued with the same promise of entitled heroism that breeds full-grown incels. 

“Kid, you wouldn’t by any chance happen to know where Greg Hartmans has been lately, would you?” Of course this is about fucking Greg. 

The thought immediately occurred to him but he wanted to give the asshole the benefit of the doubt. Sill, hearing it confirmed makes him want to kick something. Probably himself. 

“Why is he — is he in trouble?” he stupidly asks after weakly swaying on his stance. Way to go, Ed. 

“He’ll get what’s coming to him, we’ll leave it at that,” Bradley answers with a scoffed little laugh, like he’s reciting a light novel’s dialogue. Jesus fuck, he’s scary.

“Edward,” Dante clips in a warning tone so mild, he’s certain that he’s the only one in the room to catch it. “Please do share any information you have about his whereabouts, I’ve just told these gentlemen about how he’s not been coming back home for—,” Bradley’s partner holds an extended palm behind him, facing her.

“M’am,” he declares. “M’am, please, let the boy here answer that,” he says, dramatically authoritative, overinflated ego. He never once tears his eyes off of Ed, like he’s a fly on the wall about to jump off and he’d like to catch it in a glass jar. His mouth doesn’t stop working whatever it is it’s got inside. Gum? Fuck, he hates police. 

Ed swallows then, quickly deciding it’s better to go along with the official story than to pick this exact moment to wring out his bottled up mini-rant about how according to foster care protocol she should’ve alerted the authorities some time ago, and not having done so wasn’t a result of her altruistic sentiment but a move to keep the money flowing. And who the fuck knows what this woman even spends it on seeing as the house is falling to pieces, the plumbing screeches when provoked by the very wind; all her jewlery’s made of crystal at best, plastic most of the time; there’s a heating system installed which decided to commit suicide perhaps some twenty-plus years ago and he sure as fuck isn’t getting any allowances. Maybe it’s all being funneled into Evie getting special privileges such as having a tv in her room. 

“I don’t know where he is.” He tries keeping his voice level, because all he can do is that. Try. 

His eyes are suddenly hijacked with the urge to roll upwards, to make reference to the first floor, his room, his drawers, the baggie filled with pills that he’s currently keeping under the fucking pillow. Not even buried, not even concealed. Not even within the carved out hole of a book he never read. Something like El Quijote. 

Fuck. 

It’s a bundle of tramadol, ketorolak, cyclobenzaprine. He remembers Martha gave him a whole ass bottle and he thought nothing of it at the time, assuming Greg was just ghosting him and just sending all his scraps through increasingly typical indirect gestures, like Martha parking her motorbike in front of him right as he left school grounds just to come up and give him a kinder-surprise handshake — not even sticking around for a few minutes of empty small talk so that it wouldn’t look suspicious. He couldn’t complain, though. He’s always thought if you can’t pronounce the medication’s formula then you’d better steer away from taking it altogether, so all of this was better off in his hands, since he’s been able to say shit like 'dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane' without a single slip-up since he was eight. This was all meant to be, you see. 

He forces himself to fix his gaze on their black combat boots. This was all meant to be. 

Everything is falling to pieces inside his brain and he scrambles to compartmentalize. He’s Greg’s alibi. The potential mud under Bradley’s boot. The itch that makes Dante want to grind his bones into dust through the sheer force of her pin-point gaze. _Little prodigy._

He thinks about the oxy he unintentionally scored at school, tries scouring his brain for any loose ends he might’ve left unchecked. He finds none but that doesn’t mean it’s the objective truth; there might still be some lying around under his bed or in his locker. 

His locker. 

They could get a key easily enough, right? He’s fifteen, he has no goddamn rights. What did he do with Greg’s note? Did he eat that one, too? Did he throw it by the prefect’s office? Is it in his pocket right this moment? 

“We asked around the school, some of your classmates told us you two’ve been talking fairly often.” Bradley goes on with both his thumbs hooked in his pockets. “Would you say you two were close?” He gets how this could be a trick question, how they might already have the answer but… But they might not. They might not actually go about wasting their times playing mind games with kids whom they could just shove to the back of their patrol car and drive around in circles to see if they piss their pants in anticipated fear and confess to shit they haven’t done, because it’s also more fun that way, right? 

Yes, I killed JFK, it was me. Oh God, how long I’ve lived with this terrible secret. I did 9/11, sir. I am the zodiac killer. Please don’t tell my mom. 

Ed sees the assorted snacks Greg stole and gave him for dinner. He hears the conversation they had that night, how it elongated through the hours towards the feeble blue light of a new day. How they left a trail of roaches and beer cans as they drove around and made idle conversation. 

He sees himself letting go of a strained breath he didn’t know he was holding when first Greg talked to him, all that time ago. The guy was only a year older than Ed and he already claimed to know all about the ins-and-outs of the local trade business, he said all kinds of whacko shit about lumber and manufacture and warehouse rental; a fourteen-year-old with a secret piercing he always kept referencing but never actually showed Ed. He kept giggling and telling him to guess where it was while he’d been busy trying to make himself disappear until he was eighteen. Burying himself in a book or having dinner even faster than usual so he could be excused to go lock himself in his room and internally monologue about the benefits of not crying. He hadn’t back in the home. He wouldn’t now. No one would be given any of his tears. Not this house, not this bed, not even his own fingers for as long as it was necessary. 

And Greg… Fuck him. Fuck him all the way to hell. Fuck the way he always shared his meals with him for no apparent reason and made faces at Dante while she wasn’t looking. 

Fuck the way he started noticing his shaking and offered a viable solution to the pain. 

He sometimes made Ed think his guts were seconds away from dissolving in acid caused by anger, sure, but the impulse towards rage always extinguished itself with certain entropy, so soon he’d have trouble remembering what it was he was even angry about in the first place. Two weeks ago, he was seething. He was ready to kill the guy with a number two pencil, then a few minutes later he just… forgot. It’s the type of simple forgiveness you only ever extend to people you know for their fundamental flaws; quirky, kindred, close. Ripped at the seams but with nothing but warmth emanating from within. Absolutely insufferable. 

He never understood that until right now. Why the thought of him always wants to make him both growl and laugh. Why he wants to both kick him in the balls and pull him into a hug. 

Maybe he’s exaggerating, maybe Greg has never really liked him that much, but he at least has some certainty in thinking he wouldn’t ever be the first to snitch. Certainty might not even be the right word. Hope is more like it. And hope is a thoroughly stupid thing — but it must have _some_ redeemable quality if one’s willing to hang on so desperately despite that. 

He shakes his head. “ Not really.” 

And just saying that stings, somehow. He wants nothing more than to be able to lie to himself into oblivion, to pretend he doesn’t understand why his throat is contracting at the denial. He once told him about how much he’d like to turn into that white-skin colored crayon in the box on the tv ad, because it simply slipped out of him, yet not only did Greg not say anything then, he said nothing to no one, ever. 

Instead, he got him two pairs of plain cotton gloves about four entire months before Christmas. The first he ever used. He’d opened with something about how easy it was to steal shit from their local Target and that he should try it sometime, but also that he’d been reminded of the way Ed always pulled the sleeves on his sweaters down to cover most of his hand, mentioning how ‘impractical’ it was. " _Better to just pretend to have cold hands_ ", he'd said with a wink. A pretty genuine one. 

He’d accepted the gift without saying a thing and let it grow into the unshakable habit it is now, a detail absorbed into his public persona. Something comfortable and aesthetically acceptable, something he didn’t know he’d been looking for, ever since he’d gotten discharged from the clinic with no promises about his body, with its destiny set in stone. That was the first time he ever let himself cry since arriving — very quietly, breathing slowly through his mouth so that the sniffling wouldn’t give anything away, pressing his face against his mattress, impossibly confused by the fact that nice gestures could hurt even more than mean ones. 

“Well, any idea where he might be?” Bradley’s partner interjects, a bit more forceful, clearly tired of his day job, perpetually annoyed in that way only police officers know how to be, and somewhat unbelieving. Ed purses his lips some and shakes his head again, maintaining eye contact so that it seems believable enough. 

Dante’s chair creaks a little. She won’t beat him in front of an audience but maybe they will, in front of her. They’re sick of making their rounds for sure.

He knows they’ll get him soon enough, though, with or without his help. Because he’s quick on his feet and incredibly resourceful and annoyingly charismatic, but it won’t last long enough for him to keep outrunning some form of oppression. So it goes, right? He wants to be mad. He wants to run back up and throw his shit into the toilet while he rips his hair out, he wants to make himself puke out everything he’s taken in the last 48 hours, just in case. He wants to contact Greg, scream at him, tell him to skip town, tell him to please be careful… Scream at him some more. 

He considers the policemen in front of him, the cuffs they got on them, their insignias. Their lanterns and tactical glocks. They’ve got vests tightened around their long torsos and trained German shepherds like they’re divine emissaries, nothing could get in the way of them and the trashy kids with lopsided grins and stupid tattoos that do some pretty questionable things but are actually kind and comprehensive and don’t deserve bad shit to happen to them. Still, this has been a long time coming. 

Maybe he deserves to go down with him, too, if push comes to shove. He hasn’t been all that careful now that he thinks about it. People at school know him for a very specific type of trade, and sure, it’s also a form of mutually assured destruction what keeps his little side business under wraps, and sure, that nuclear principle is also nothing more than another manifestation of blind hope… 

Bradley turns his lukewarm smirk back to Dante and asks, “Say, you wouldn’t mind if we took a quick look upstairs, would you? It’s just that kids his age, well they usually leave something behind before running away. A note, cellphone, something that might point us in the right direction.” And Ed can’t believe he tenses in genuine surprise, like an electric jolt spears through his body. 

It feels too weird to be sharing an uncomfortable, conspirative silence with fucking Dante — as their gazes lock for a quarter second across the room — since they both know damn well they wouldn’t find shit after months of him not stepping foot on these grounds save for that one time he climbed up to Ed’s window like the dramatic dumbass he is. The only reason his continued absences at school hadn’t been called into Child Services was that the official story included some teary narrative about Greg ‘needing specialized attention and opting for concluding his higher education through a homeschooling scheme’. 

But of course, denying them entrance would look weird, and he doesn’t know anything outside patchwork pieces of CSI Miami information that use the concept of a search warrant kind of leisurely to try and stop the inevitable, so he wordlessly steps aside as they’re granted complete access and stomp their way upstairs after she tells them which room it is. 

He lingers dumbly at the entrance for the few silent seconds it takes for Dante to snap.

“Go to your room,” she clips acidly. 

He obediently turns on his heel and hurries to go grab the baggie under his pillow. In a sprint of hysteria, he seriously considers downing them all in one gulp, we all gotta die somehow. Someway. Someplace. 

Instead, he ends up stashing them inside his right boot before sitting on the floor, waiting for the unbearable noise of the officers trashing the room next to his to die down. 

*

Fire surges with sudden intent, but thankfully still within the limiting confines of a desktop computer screen that’s covered in greasy fingerprints. He’s not sure what time it is. 

They stare at the video some more, after the initial jump scare of that unexpected flare-up had them both slightly leaning back in their chairs and Ed’s jaw tensing so hard he swears he hears something pop. It wouldn’t be the first time during this pandemonium of a week. 

Roy brings his hand up to the mouse sitting at the right side of the monitor and pulls the player back. They sit in silence for a few seconds longer, during which Roy’s lips part and close a couple of times before his feelings actually acquire the fitting words. 

“I’m having a _really_ hard time,” he says, “with the fact that Havoc chose this exact moment to prove he could pull off a trick shot through a literal line of fire and pay no mind to — oh, look, and then he actually scored it,” he broods annoyedly, throwing his hand towards the screen in a disdainful gesture. “At least he didn’t piss on it.” 

Ed gulps down on the syrupy soda he sneaked in and works some of the bubbling aftertaste around his mouth, ignoring the way his irritated tonsils react to the cold. “Why’re we watching this on a library computer, are the early 2k comebacks really that serious?” 

Roy takes a break from busily disapproving of a victorious Jean Havoc, mutely depicted basking in his party-trick glory while completely ignoring the fact that the motherfucking pool table is on fire, before turning to Ed.

“Well, they’re… Readily available, right?”

Ed stares. “C’mon, you don’t use these unless you’re confecting a plan to kill somebody,” 

“You mean people use Internet Explorer to search the words ‘how to kill somebody’?” He playfully arches an eyebrow. Ed’s stomach still contracts at that even though it’s been almost two weeks of constant exposure to Roy’s charming antics because life is full of injustice — so much so, that it doesn’t give a crap how upset his stomach has already been since the weekend. “Because if so, it’s fair to say that that ‘someone’ will be safe for the foreseeable future…” 

“Don’t believe me,” Ed says, “but the kids that come here to use the fuckin _internet_ are all bordering the line in between like, cute weird and weird-weird.” A lot of images come to mind to illustrate his own point. People mindlessly using Microsoft Paint to draw dicks and saturated landscapes; people skipping class to play Slenderman and scare the shit out of themselves; freshmen girls nervously paging through the Yahoo Answers section of all the female-pleasure-related knowledge that their sex-ed course purposely avoids. Other, more worrying shit is often related to searches on body decomposition or incidentally pornographic chat roulettes. 

Legend has it, Greg once managed to change all the backgrounds to different parts of a dachshund dog so that its torso was about five computers long. 

He shouldn’t think about him. What he should do is deflect. 

“You also come here fairly often,” Roy points out, “so which category fits you best?” He speaks gently, the better to not get shushed again for their unruly volumes at this sanctuary of stillness. 

Ed limits himself to shrug along a muttered ‘I dunno’, bringing the Orange Crush can back to his lips. He remembers the way Jerso and Zampano have been trying to gift him new cellphones and a laptop every Christmas for years now, and how he’s always made such a teary, pleading mess of himself that they’ve had to retract their benevolence every time for fear of causing him an anxiety-induced hernia. If keeping his guilt and dignity on an acceptable balance means blending in with the library goth crowd, then so be it. 

“Are you planning to harm yourself or others and intend to use the school’s connection to assist your heinous plans?” He leans in, “Because that’s about as far as my NDA with you goes.” Ed narrows his eyes at him. 

“You wouldn’t rat me out about my search history of 75-millimeter sample-tubes, you chickenshit bastard,” he drawls, a fairly obscure reference to him bringing up the printed sheets of lab equipment possibilities over to Izumi’s office like a kid with a Christmas wish list. She always pats his head in that way that makes him seethe and tells him to “ _Go talk to our district’s representatives about public school funding_ ”.

He’s only ranted to Roy about this once, a few days ago. Once was enough to feel like enough of an idiot for caring so much about how their current beakers have fucking coffee stains on them at the 30ml mark. 

But Roy chuckles — which also still does things to his physiology, like uncoil his guts in unabashed relief at what a good sign that is, about how okay things still are, despite everything and even through the trials of his trash mouth; through the thick and thin of what he guesses some people would call his ‘quirks’ but are more like phases of hyperfixation he’d never bothered to keep in check before. 

“You’re right,” Roy answers, “but that’s…, That only has to do with my obvious taste for your brand of ‘cute-weird’.” He turns a look at him that’s very fucking ambiguous and Ed wants to screech.

“Eugh,” he half-heartedly mutters instead, assuming it was meant as something like a compliment to his usual, what should he call it. Eccentricity. He slightly hunches on himself, turning his head away and quickly sneaking in another sip like he’s snorting a line on a school property hardwood table. 

And then another. 

And maybe he makes this one long and bountiful because it beats having to face Roy head-on when he says shit like this, and Ed knows he’s not well equipped to pass that test just yet. He had better just stick to filling his mouth with soda at any available slot of silence and file these convoluted feelings in the back of his mind, for later consideration and all that. 

All this unwarranted anxiety is probably just the lasting aftereffect from that time, three days ago, when Roy picked him up from work (as per Ed’s hopefully unsuspicious insistence he don’t go to his actual address) and they went on to watch the first of their local theatre’s Halloween nostalgia marathon, inaugurating on the latter half of October with Friday the 13th, and it so turned out Mustang is the type of guy to really lean into all the cutesy stuff right away and without preamble. 

Like how he’d told him to wait in his seat so he’d have enough time to round up the car and open the door for him — which was stupid. Is stupid. Stupid weird. An obsolete gesture that left Ed shaking with his hand paused on the handle and something in his chest doing constant backflips. At least that served as an immediate distraction to the patrol car that had just rounded the corner onto that same street and made him swear he was about to shit his own heart out for a second there. 

Once inside, Roy swung his arm around his shoulders and only then did stupid Ed realize this was what the kids would call ‘an actual date’. 

It also caused him to flinch at least an inch into the air and his head to almost roll off his shoulders with the sheer gravitas of his uncontested embarrassment until Roy simply tried again after a few minutes, albeit a lot more slowly, and not from behind, and Ed begrudgingly settled into it and said something stupid to try and ease the tension because he was going to make that shit fucking _work_ , goddamnit. 

The point is, whatever nervous one-liner he’d spewed in the hopes of ignoring if people were staring at them or not, worked, and made Roy’s laughter rumble through his chest and against Ed’s shoulder and fucking shit that felt good, being encapsulated against someone’s body. It’s terrifying how hard and fast one can fall into the undying need for cheesy affection.

He ordered candy for both of them and said things like, “ _You always let the one who asks you out pay for the whole thing, alright?_ ” and “ _Try M &M’s on butter pop-corn, you’ll like it,_” and “ _Next week they’re screening Rosemary’s Baby; that’ll be on you,_ ” to which Ed grinned, noting that above all, he felt pretty okay. 

His medication was wearing off, there was this incessant tension headache constantly tingling at his temples and acute paranoia turning his guts like they were part of this evil, nonstop-motion cauldron and... He felt pretty okay. 

“ _I have a shit salary; I can buy you a pack of fruit roll-ups and walk you home,_ ” he answered easily enough while dying inside at the implication that they’d be doing this again. There’s no hyperbole here. Dying. It was nice. 

He excused himself to the bathroom only once, thinking pop-corn would help him digest the medication faster, anyway, and would give the extended-release mechanism a helping hand. He downed it with tap water, hastily cupped into his palm while thinking there was a joke somewhere about taking a literal chill-pill. Two, actually. 

Looking in the mirror, staring at two eyes of fractal yellow and tightening the pony tail a bit. He felt content. Safe in the knowledge that the dose would kick in during the movie and he could just sit comfortably until it happened. Roy pushed the separating armrest between their seats up and once again brought his hand around his frame. 

All he had to do from there was wait, wait and share candy and drink sprite from the same straw and feel well adjusted for the actual first time in his entire life. He ate most of the chocolate first, to ensure his mouth didn’t taste of desmethyltramadol, and then everything went dandy. 

Roy sighs forcefully while looking back at the computer screen. “I just can’t be associated with this event in any way…, I don’t have the fortunes needed to pay for the damage — my Aunt’s going to cut my balls off…” He trails off, pressing his eyelids together. Ed decides to file the impending question at his sudden shift — as well as the mention of this particular family member — for another time. Meanwhile, it’s just nice to know that Roy Mustang has actual fears, kind of like a real human made of flesh and blood and relatives that’d maim him for hanging out with arsonist jackasses. 

“I don’t think Ling’s pressing any charges. Rumor has it that wasn’t even his main house.” Not a rumor. Fact. Fact shared with him by the guy himself in a very off-handed type of way which only suits a loaded kid like him. Ed doesn’t even react to that sort of information anymore. 

Roy’s phone buzzes on the table, he takes a quick glance at the screen before sighing tiredly and pushing the chair back. 

“I have to go,” he says. 

Ed nods, looking at the muddied laces on his left boot, propped up on the edge of the chair. He hopes no one gets crap for the dirty furniture. “Okay,” he says, placing a careful hand on his knee when he feels a slight tingle on the tendons at the underside of it. 

The sky outside is almost plum black even though it’s nearing 10 am, or so he thinks. Looking at clocks only seems to frustrate him lately, it’s never the time he thinks it is. Also, fuck this time of year — even if it does kind of redeem itself through the autumn cut-out decorations that fill the halls and some classroom cork boards. Little brown cardboard leaves and pumpkins with smiley faces are really all it takes to make him feel sort of calm and kind of happy. It’s dumb, he knows that. They’re reminiscences of the child he could never let himself be, getting excitedly agitated at things as stupid as making it to the vending machines behind the school’s gym and realizing he and his two dollars can really have anything they want. 

“I’ll see you later,” Roy says before crouching down to plant a quick kiss to his temple, which is indescribable, because the feeling of it will stick with him for the rest of the week and he’s reluctant to think that that’s normal. He had a hard enough time realizing he’d tried to postpone washing his hand all day after Roy had suddenly caught it in his and gave it a slight squeeze while slowly walking past him in the hall. The amount of water he had to down in order to get his heart to retreat from the base of his throat and back towards it’s side of his chest plate after that was unquantifiable. 

He’s tried working up the courage to ask him to stop, to tone it down a notch, because it’ll do him well to keep in mind that he’s still pretty much at risk of getting his eyes beaten out of his skull with a crucifix should any of this PDA bullshit make it to the internal gossip tabloids at home. Even if she might be preoccupied with other, more pressing stuff at the moment, Dante always has some god fearing punishment tactics to spare. 

At the same time, the fervent suicidal in him doesn’t want to change a thing about it. About Roy. About the way the wind blows in current times. 

“Yeah, sure,” he says instead, like he has been for almost two weeks now. Twelve entire days of… This. Of Roy seeking him out and laughing at the dumb shit he says and telling them to exchange numbers for ‘schoolwork purposes’. It’s hard to understand that this might be the norm to most people — constantly having your mouth against someone else’s under rusty bleachers and just rolling with the aftershock of it. For people like Greg, this was one of those major non-issues in life; one went about kissing, tonguing, fucking and fingering other people with about as much worry as the one dedicated to cracking an egg on a sizzling pan, doing push-ups, driving a car. Then again, Greg never had much of an issue with anything, it seems. It occurs to him now that he should’ve been paying more attention to that idiot as he spewed about his conquests, maybe he could’ve gotten a thing or two out of it. Maybe.

Roy’s hand lingers a bit on his shoulder before flying off — and he’d much rather focus on that, on the unexpected softness of his palms, the veins on his forearms. Who cares what Greg did or didn’t do, what he thought or didn’t think. 

Who cares. Who cares. 

Roy. He’s found it pretty easy to make him laugh. But Ed doesn’t know what any of this does for him, is the problem. 

Maybe it’s that he’s so unlike Mustang’s usual type that he’s got a certain level of exoticism to his side. Maybe it’s that his looks tend to lean towards the feminine. Maybe Roy’s afraid of peaking in high school and wants someone messed up to ruin his chances of that. Tip the balance. 

He’s brought back to earth when Roy flicks the can in his hand and smirks. “Stop drinking that, it’s disgusting.” 

It is, probably. After the third consecutive can, the thirst is unmanageable and the cloy in his mouth makes him sick, but it’s still relatively early in the morning, he’s still balancing himself on that limbo that goes from Nyquill-induced sleep to adderall’s demand for productivity, especially when SAT’s are finally rolling up with a flood of realism but so is the bone-picking cold that makes the tip of his nose feel like a runny ball of ice every time he runs the back of his palm against it once his kleenex run out. He has to keep the pain in check and protect the minimal five hours of daily sleep which are apparently all that stands between him and complete insanity; letting his body uncoil and sink towards the underworld with its unparalleled weight at night, letting his brain float away and stick itself to the corners of the roof of his bedroom. He also has to keep himself awake and hungry enough. Functional. 

He gets out of bed and it takes a minute to go from the lethargic pull of his relaxed muscles to the gradual alert of his waking hours, it’s an excursion that makes spots awareness slowly begin to dance back into his vision like corn popping inside his skull. He can even hear it linger when Roy makes that sound with his fingers and the aluminum in his hands. 

Sugar, according to Greg, always helps accelerate the rate at which he’ll get back to the advanced placement student with a bad case of verbal diarrhea he’s supposed to be. Then again, Greg pretty much gave him enough life hacks about smart consumption and eating habits to last a lifetime, but he’s found that this was one of the most innocuous ones. 

“I’ll switch to Delaware Punch,” Ed says after his moment of silent conjecture as Mustang begins walking away with his feet moving behind him. That’s what too much confidence in the world looks like, right there. He makes a face and Ed’s heart lurches, which fucking hurts, by the way. 

“My, when was the last time you had plain water?” he whispers as further distance is put between them, at this rate they’ll be whisper-screaming at each other in a few seconds. 

“Eighteen months,” he tries, but it’s already too loud and a sharp “ _Shh_ ” comes from one of the study tables a few feet over. He clamps his mouth shut. Roy snorts before turning on his heel while typing away at his phone. Ed’s dings a few seconds after he disappears through the shelves on his right and he gets shushed again, probably by the same annoyed student that isn’t having it for how noisy his entranced, dumbstruck ass has been this entire time. 

He curses and ticks the sound off before seeing it’s a text from Roy. He can’t not smile at the gesture. 

_I would like to request that your gravestone read ‘Roy Mustang tried'_

Seeing his name on his contacts and messaging list is surreal. Good-surreal, but strange enough that it’s still very daunting. 

Ed’s first instinct, though, reminds him that by all means and if dictated solely by the odds, he should have already died on an ambulance stretcher five years ago. Would it be acceptably romantic to add that he’s glad they tubed him up so that he didn’t, otherwise they wouldn’t have met? Would he get some heart-eyed emojis in return for that? Just thinking of all the filth he was bathing in for so many years makes him want to jump ship before it’s too late. He’s aware of how much they clash and contrast in that respect. 

Getting out of that train of thought feels like slapping a dexterous mosquito away. He’s gotta be quick, precise, and make sure it’s got no intentions of making it back to him. 

There’s no point in dwelling on it. He had a real shitty time and then it was over. It was tolerable. The End. 

Hughes tries to segue into it, sometimes, as he does into all aspects of his life. Ed’s on their list — the one all teaching staff have stashed in some drawer, it’s for kids with learning disabilities, ankle bracelets; kids from integration programs and mild to severe dyslexia; kids with disciplinary issues, minors placed in foster care. This essentially means that whatever personal adolescent tragedy he’s keeping under wraps is fair game to their sympathetic prodding. 

Sometimes he says something just to feed that beast. 

He says something unjustifiably crude and gruesome about his near-sepsis at the clinic and Mr. Hughes presses his lips in a firm line and then Ed immediately asks if he can have one of the candy-cane mints he’s got sitting in a crystal bowl on the far edge of his desk. Hughes blinks himself out of the trance and says, “ _Of course, Ed! You can have as many as you want — here, why don’t you take a couple with you? I honestly don’t think any other student appreciated them as much as you do_ ,” and he laughs nervously, scratching his chin. Then Ed asks if he can leave, and Hughes doesn’t have the mind to say no to him. It’s simple quid-pro-quo. He gets to jot that down on an ominous file and Ed gets to go pretend he isn’t obligated to attend their sessions twice weekly. Principal’s orders. 

The only downside is that he exits into the hallway realizing that what he’d recounted was probably a true story. As true as his unreliable narrator of a hippocampus can go, anyway. It’s likely that his muscles were actually drooping off his bones at some point. Likely they jammed a catheter in him so he wouldn’t contaminate his wounds with his own urine. Likely the fever made him convulse on more than one occasion and he kept waking up to ask the paper walls how the fuck he wasn’t dead yet. It feels like that game — two truths, one lie, only he doesn’t even know which one is which. 

They walk that line between dream and memory in a way that leaves his stomach turned sideways and his entire core humid with the muggy reminder of a sickness he may have not recovered from, not fully. He mumbles half-hearted curses to himself and swirls the candy around his mouth, he makes it clatter against the back of his front teeth and molars. Back and forth. 

Back and forth. 

He’s doing it again. Ed lets out a clipped, stifled groan. He should get going, too. Whatever — right? What the fuck ever. He doesn’t actually recall, his imagination’s just making up for lost text. 

_i want my organs donated to science and the remaining carcass dumped in a compost, so…_ he types up. He hesitates. His thumb hovers over the little ‘send’ icon while he wonders exactly how weird is too much for people like Roy. 

He eventually presses it, and that’s that.

*

He runs his fingers through the scrunched up flyer in all its pumpkin orange and deep-bruise purple mashup, it announces their annual All Hallows Eve carnival shitshow with their trademark spooky font. It screams ‘come and sprain your ankles while running for your life in our Haunted House adventure’, ‘get high off your tits and make our contractor for mine train roller coasters quit again because of the vomit flood complaints’. 

Who knows what they’re bringing in this year. Last time they hired deranged clowns with allegedly fake knives and let them run loose around an arena filled with completely trashed hormonal teenagers, it apparently didn’t end well. At least that’s what Winry tells him, he doesn’t really like these events. 

“I don’t really like these events,” he answers Roy’s question as his arm is resting leisurely around his waist. They’re sitting on one of the outside benches that give way to the main entrance steps, there’s a chilly draft swirling around them and the accumulating bunches of dried leaves on the ground, which he tells himself is the only reason he hasn’t told Mustang to fuck off with his affectionate touches. 

He both takes great pleasure in and fucking hates what a typical week it’s been. Who does it think it is? Giving him both the worst headaches he’s ever experienced and the most excruciating constant paranoid-induced nausea right next to Roy fully hugging him for the first time ever. It was a short-lived affair, but by all means life-changing. It happened the day Greg was finally made by the authorities, and although the wildfire-spreading rumors about it were all the rage, he didn’t say anything, and it might have not even been related. At least Ed liked thinking it wasn’t. He returned home to neatly fold the jacket he’d been wearing when Roy’s arms circled him, leaving it at the back of his middle drawer instead of the laundry bin, like it carried some great secret in the lingering feeling of Roy’s scent. 

Greg was arrested on a Tuesday, just three days after Bradley’s visit. Luisa walks around the house like a dormant ghost of uncertainty while all legalities ensue. They’ll give him at least two to three years for the accumulated petty crimes he’s submerged himself in over the course of his early adolescence, this essentially means he’ll turn eighteen while in juvie and still months away from completing his time. This means he’ll be transferred. This means he’s probably heading to a fuck awful time in his life and Ed doesn’t have the presence of mind to be able to rationalize how he feels about it. It’s like it didn’t really happen because he didn’t actually see it, however stupid that logic may be. The last time he saw Greg they didn’t even talk, the guy was making his social rounds at the endless distance of the same damn halls he gets to walk through every day. Then he sort of disappeared. Hell — it’s not like he doesn’t have any notions of permanence, he obviously knows that Greg’s wearing a monochrome jumper by now, but his guts still have a rough time getting on board the train of fucking reason. It just doesn’t feel real at all. 

It might have to do with how absurdly normal things have been aside from that; the school’s bells have kept ringing right on fucking cue. He’s being invited to have a grand ol’ time at a carnival with a bunch of guys who like getting piss drunk in the trunk of other people’s cars. He looks down at the generalized invitation again as he spreads the paper on the table’s wooden boards. He tries smoothing it out but the protuberances of dried pigeon shit underneath it don’t let that happen. It’s just a nervous gesture, anyway. There’s thousands of these circulating around the neighborhood. So many sacrificed trees. 

“What would it take to change your mind?” Roy asks, lightly resting his cheek atop Ed’s head. He shrugs, trying to memorize what the added weight on him feels like. 

“Flying pigs. Freezing hell.”

“I will see what I can do,” the bastard diligently says while diving his free hand into the bag of almonds they’re currently both eating out of. This is bordering on surreal. At least he hasn’t asked about the whole young criminal ordeal everyone seems to be whispering about behind his back. 

A guy halted in the middle of reciting his pledge of allegiance just to elbow the dude next to him and cock his head in Ed’s direction. Although that could’ve been about anything — about him being the only student who got a perfect mark in their calculus exam, about him being one of Roy Mustang’s most recent fixations, about his foster brother being on his way to never make it out of the damn system for the crimes committed against old fucks like Bradley and not having enough capital for any actual legal representation. 

He forces himself to dig into the bag and chew out the noise of his buzzing brain while Breda moves a bishop three slots. Mustang squints at the piece and lightly taps his knuckles against the table. 

“Y’know,” Heymans starts, “It’s just a really good opportunity to see the town from the top of the ferris wheel.” 

Roy huffs out a little laugh while making his move. “It gives you perspective on how little there is to see.” 

Breda hums, “Word.”

“I get the sense you like making yourself sad,” he says, but immediately regrets it as images of Roy’s condition start making it back to him. The tiny thread of compulsions he sees shine through some very, very thin cracks. The feeble light of some mild-to-severe sickness that’s been kept a relative mystery. But he knows. And Roy knows he knows, right? He’s way too perceptive to not catch a hint of what Ed notices, even if they don't talk about it. 

Those hints are barely there, and maybe it’s just Ed being an obsessive observant of the people he likes — kind of how he notices the way Winry bites pen caps and scratches the nape of her neck when she’s getting frustrated, how she always shakes the milk carton around for longer than necessary before pouring it out —, but they’re there. Like the fact that Roy drinks a lot. It’s gone from suspicion to an absolute truth. He drinks a fucking ton. He doesn’t particularly enjoy it. He pretends he does. He feigns excitement at the prospect. He’s got something of a monstrous tolerance. He constantly licks his lips when he’s uncomfortable. He’s hyper-aware of his own body. How he moves it. Even the way he blinks sometimes feels practiced.

Some days, he looks up at the sky a lot, he screws his eyes shut when it's sunny. On said days, Ed looks at him while he does. He looks at his profile and marvels at how the human face can arrive at such perfect confections, kind of like plant cells seen in their perfectly mathematical compositions, kind of like the organized rows on honeycombs. They’re just right. 

Roy sighs exaggeratedly. “Blame it on Lord Byron.” 

Ed doesn’t get the reference, but obviously doesn’t say so. He also doesn’t say that he wishes it weren’t like that, for Roy, because it’s a child’s dream. Who knows how long his life has been this way. Probably for just long enough that the medicine has embedded itself so deep into the fabric of his core, that drinking so much with uninterrupted doses is as bad as if someone flicked his shoulder. He thinks he’s probably just as bad, although he doesn’t actively seek sources of melodrama, he doesn’t read depressing Russian novels about the depths of existential despair. 

It doesn’t make him happy, either. He wouldn’t say he’s a ‘happy’ person. Not like Greg was, anyway. 

Is. 

Or... Who the fuck knows. 

He knows that sometimes it was contagious enough. Sometimes it did do the trick. Sometimes it was enough to make him want to smile instead of mope uninterruptedly while counting the cracks on the walls of his room, thinking about Al, wondering if his little brother was having a good time at that moment, if he was getting ice cream or on a piggyback ride with one of his dads; if he was in a museum or at the zoo; if he was watching tv, flicking through one of those medical soaps, laughing on a couch. 

He looks down at his knees, trying to stop thinking about it, because he’s slept terribly enough that if he were to squint a little too hard, he’d no doubt make out Greg’s frame, like a ghost skipping around, somewhere around the grass, being the annoying ass he’s always been, getting people hyped about Halloween festivities. 

Ed instinctively huddles a bit closer to Roy’s side, grateful his callous remarks haven’t made him retract his arm and that they're still on the same implicit page of not asking each other about personal stuff. Roy responds by absentmindedly squeezing his right shoulder a bit, and it doesn’t hurt too bad today so Ed doesn’t react, rather he smiles, but Roy can’t see him because he’s immersed on the board in front, plotting his next move. 

*

It’s Friday and half his classes are marked by absences. This happens every year; people get a nasty case of the flu right before big events because schoolwork can’t get in the way of planning how many tabs of acid they’re gonna drop in a few hours. Greg was always super siked about the Carnival. The Carnival was his _thing_. His earthly kingdom of chaos and consumption. He once managed to get forcefully removed from their county-renowned House of Spooks for smuggling in a creepy pork mask and jumping on the paid actors there. Some kids got scared by the fact that he was single-handedly fighting off a demon and asylum-escapee who had had enough of their shitty jobs and decided to take it out on the high school jackass who’d decided to mess with them further. 

The memory of the video his idiot friends took and distributed makes him have to tuck his lips into his mouth to prevent himself from snorting out loud. The impulse doesn’t let up, and after a few seconds he’s actively suppressing an uncontrollable surge of laughter. It’s like that time he found a random episode of Sesame Street while channel surfing at Winry’s and couldn’t for the life of him get it under control. He eventually made Winry and even Granny start laughing too — pretty much _at_ him, while he doubled over on the couch, truly unable to explain what part of that simple-ass Kermit was so murderous. Maybe just the fact that it was easy. 

It gets so bad his hands actually start trembling and he feels lightheaded. 

He asks for permission to go to the bathroom and walks down the hall with the necessary hall pass in one hand and spurts of deranged chuckles forcefully leaving his stomach. He actually makes it to the bathroom, at a loss of a better place to be. He locks himself in a stall and sits over the closed lid, trying to get his breathing under control and eventually just giving into the joy of having lived so closely to one of the worst people alive — how does the saying go, too weird to live, too strange to die? — Greg Hartmans.

Ed laughs with his face pressed into his knees. 

He remembers this one time where the intro to Danny Phantom was on their beat-up tv set and Greg started manically dancing to its beat, saying something about DJ-D Wrek, claiming he knew how to breakdance and do fucking backflips on their living room carpet. This prepubescent teenager who used too much eyeliner and was wearing a Wells-Fargo second-hand T-shirt and said, “ _Yo, check it_ ,” while he began pretending he had the moves, until Dante yelled at him from the top floor, told him to stop that at once, to turn off that racket. “And what in the hell are you laughing about?” she snapped at Ed, who simply sat in the reclinable chair looking at the trainwreck in front of him, frankly not caring if she took away their television privileges once again because this was quality entertainment if he’d ever seen any. 

Thinking back on it, he’s glad he didn’t look away or run off. He’s glad he’s got this random memory of Greg doing what he called the ‘salmon dance’ stuck to his brain forever. 

Maybe that’s the kind of thing you ought to want to keep from a friend, when everything else goes to shit. A memory. 

It’s only when he parts his face from his lap that he sees the darkened stains of dampness on his knees. His uncovered hand touches his eyes and feels the moisture from his own tears. He can’t tell at what point they started coming, he even doesn’t know how long he’s been here, but his breath hitches out of nowhere. 

He thinks about how Greg is the only one in the world who’s ever managed to make him break his no-breakdown promise more than once. 

Fuck him. 

*

 _Be my Halloween date, I’ll get you all the glazed-donut deep-fried turkey hamburgers you want_ , Mustang texts him an hour later. 

_it sounds like you’re tryna convince me never to go out again, ever,_ he replies, even though he’s already given in. 

_You didn’t let me finish. I’ll get you all the glazed-donut deep-fried turkey hamburgers you want, so that you may destroy them with your bare fist in front of the stall as a political statement on culinary travesties._

Ed sighs. His eyes still feel a little puffy, his back strained. 

_shit mustang,_

He types, _that’s all you had to say_


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey y'all I'm back, I am back. Thought you'd seen the last of me but this fic has effectively phagocyted an entire section of my prefrontal cortex. So I'm here, bearing gifts and apologies and a huge 16k chapter to share with all of you. This chapter took a fucking lustrum to write but it is done! 
> 
> Warnings for this one are some sexual content, drugs, bad decisions (or as Sky brilliantly put it, assorted examples of youthful bullshittery) and some trademark angst, obviously, because this is what happens when I take a highschool au way too seriously.

There’s a feeling that begins as nothing more than a lurking crawl in his stomach while the clock ticks closer and closer to six pm. He thinks all Octobers are just as weird. 

School is long from being out, yet most folks still take the opportunity to get somewhat festive despite the fact that most people his age will probably have to go through with presenting their SAT’s while doing community service for the wreckage they caused on the 31st. 

For now, though, the air smells of distant smoke and almost every storefront has its mandatory mutilated pumpkin, sitting at the steps, watching as kids stroll by with the garbage they’ll throw on Old Man Hawkeye’s front yard before running for their lives in the hopes that Riza wasn’t home. In the hopes that, if she was, her BB gun will only graze their heels as they disappear into the night. 

Ed and Sheska are circa-twenty minutes shy from beginning to passive-aggressively count the pennies in the register — something they usually do as a means of hurrying up whatever customers are left lingering right before they close, only this is a Saturday they’re dealing with. A Saturday on the 24th of October. 

The place is a ghost town, as it rightfully should be, because the only two people in this entire municipality that’d spend their weekend nights on the last bookstore that hasn’t gotten chased out of business by a Barnes and Noble, are the ones currently working in it. 

Ed doesn’t realize he’s been chewing on the tips of his hair until he feels a wet strand kiss his cheek. It’s a nasty habit, but it isn’t much worse than the one he’s made out of passively ignoring people that have been talking to him for the better part of half an hour. 

“…was a parking lot incident involving a lot of punched tires, so I’m just hoping this year doesn’t go off the rails. My mom doesn’t really use the car a lot anymore, but still, we only have the one! So what do you say?” she chatters while adding one last book into the stack piled by the desk computer behind the counter. 

A draft rattles the front doors. 

“Ed?”

“H-huh?” He looks over at her and her characteristically tilted head. 

She smiles, too used to dealing with him by now. “I asked if you need a ride to the Carnival!” 

There’s a feeling that begins as nothing more than a lurking clamber, but it slips up the length of his throat like a living, trotting thing when Sheska turns the ignition and they drive away into the twilight. 

Mustang had offered to simply meet directly at the site instead of going through the entirety of a light novel's courting motions. He’d been grateful for that take at first, because he finds all of it makes him too fucking embarrassed — like kissing and holding hands isn’t the simple vanilla shit it is, like Dante’s lesson on virtuousness is finally getting to him and he can’t help but see himself strictly from the outside. And _outside_ is a cold, cruel, unsentient thing. 

He’d be lying if he didn’t admit to second thoughts about it, now. About just arriving someplace he doesn’t really want to be at alone — or at all, for that matter. Someplace where the night air is sticky with liquorice and distant cotton candy that ends up plastered on the dirty soles of people’s shoes. 

When his coworker’s gentle small talk is interfered by the sound of rubber on a dirt ground, announcing their arrival to the parking lot, it’s like the entire vehicle starts humming through the growing vibrations of this misplaced sensation. Something like a bad omen. The ambience is reduced to the last rays of orange, withering in the brisk air. 

The bustle of cars and distant, excited chatter starts gnawing at him at a growing rhythm. 

“Jeez, I didn’t think parking would be an issue,” Sheska muses, slightly leaning towards the steering wheel in the hunt for an empty space. 

“People hate walking,” Ed answers. On bad days, he is one of such people. 

The sky is minutes away from losing the last of its tint. And thus begins the eternal witching hour — ‘ _tis the witching time of night, orbed is the moon and bright_ , or however the hell that John Keats poem goes. Fuck Mr. Hughes for trying to get him into poetry. Metrics. Creative writing. Expressing yourself through non-violent outlets, which is a strategy he guesses works best on students with disciplinary issues, and he’s never had any outward issues with authority. Growing up in an orphanage and sleeping on stacked up rows of mattresses stuffed with lead teaches one a thing or two about honing your skills with internal snark and satisfying comebacks you’ll never get to say out loud. But… Maybe Mr. Hughes doesn’t really deserve any of it. The guy is actually pretty alright, Ed has to remember that everyone’s gotta eat and really, _someone’s_ got to fill the counselor job. He’s probably just doing what he can with a handful of problematic children in an underpaid position. It could be worse, it always could. 

It always could. 

They get out and start inching towards the ticket booth, he tries his darnedest to keep up with the friendly small talk as he and Sheska make their way through a dissonant crowd of all ages. The Carnival’s supposed to be a family-friendly event, open to the general public since noon. Parents and their kids start leaving right around this hour, though, and all that’s left behind is a growing cluster of unreasonable teens, right at the edge of their own childhood’s nostalgia, screaming, laughing, choking on their first cigarettes and telling the nurse-station’s attendants that they’re indeed puking because the merry-go-round went too fast, certainly not because their parents are alcohol “connoisseurs” and they found a little green bottle of something called ‘soju’ at the back of their liquor shelf. 

Lights flicker as the last hints of daylight finally hide behind the horizon. The carousel lights up. Blue, green, yellow, purple, red. Trailing light bulbs and ‘step right up’s’. Everything smells of panic. 

People shut their cars with haste and make their way over to the entrance, all idle, jerking limbs. Grins so wide they could suck the world in. What the fuck is he doing here? 

Sheska meets up with her own friends and extends him an unnecessary amount of courtesy. He politely waves at her to go have her own fun without the burden of his socially-challenged ass and proceeds to hide his fists in his pockets and… Stares into a horizon of endless decadence. 

Discordant music blasts from odd places, some of them being the open trunks in which small groups of people are lighting up.

Okay. He attempts going back to basics, one foot in front of the other; one second after another. 

Like his brain is running a randomized maintenance check, he looks at all the banners and internally repeats them to himself, letter for letter and word for word. ‘ _Can you read this, you useless ball of anxiety-made person?_ ’ his mind asks, ‘ _Yes_ ,’ he answers, stupidly engaging with himself in yet another one of those pointless battles. ‘ _See, that one over there says Funhouse. F, u, n, h, o, u, s, e. That other one is Funny Bear Ice-Cream._ ’ 

He pauses. 

‘ _F, u, n, n, y, b, e, a, r, i, c, e, c, r, e, a, m,_ ’ Has he seen that one before? It looks and sounds and all-around feels familiar. Funny bear… 

Funny. 

‘ _All that stopped you from entering the spelling-bee contests was your irrational fear of massive success, there, champ,_ ’ His brain tells him, dripping sarcasm like acid through his skull. Ed clicks his tongue at nothing in particular, still walking like a wounded animal that’s working with the last of its vital strength. He has to get through this — he has to, because it’s seriously impossible for all of this to be so damn hard. He should’ve accepted Winry’s offer to chaperone him around, but she was only being friendly, too, because Ling (fucking somehow) got first dibs into spending the night with her and she felt curious enough to decide to at least humor the guy for a night. If they start dating he’s going to have to throw himself off a bridge. 

Scratch that. No one’s dying tonight. No one’s dying, full-stop. 

Maybe he ought to just call Roy. He’s got his number for a reason, right? It’s not like the guy wouldn’t expect a call, especially after telling him to meet up here. Just fucking call. 

Or maybe a text message. 

Yeah, that’s actually worlds better and feels less… Confrontational. More like he’s a normal human being and not a sore, bleeding thumb. 

The lighting around him flashes in complete disregard of potentially epileptic people — a demographic which _he_ himself might belong to, now that he thinks of it. Sure, the only times he’s had seizures were all fever-related events, but the brain’s pathways must remember some of that neural strain, right? The same way that he isn’t infected down to his bones right _now_ , but his flesh never fails to bring forth the reminder of what that pain felt like. 

It’s like the arcade soundscape he walks by is staring at his neck, but he doesn’t shudder, that much he can control. 

Before he knows it, two mostly-useless feet have dragged him over to a purple ice-cream truck by his right. The very thought of eating something sweet dredges up a puddle of acid saliva under his tongue, like when you’re seconds away from vomiting all over yourself with such violence it brings dark spots into your vision. 

He sees a scrawny man with eyes as wide as plates handing out a couple of cones to two girls he recognizes from Winry’s grade. Ed lets his eyes stick to the way one of them gives her strawberry sorbet an indifferent lick before walking away and throwing it in the trashcan by her side. 

The second girl follows suit. They both keep the little paper cone used to cover the cracker’s base and rise it in the air, like in mock toasting — a toast to the effervescence of life, or some equally adolescent crap before throwing their heads back and swallowing the unknown contents of it. 

Ah.

“Hiya, Ed,” a voice calls, he whips his head in its direction to see a pair of bare shoulders. He had no idea the snake tattoo was so big, it practically envelops her entire back as she turns to face him completely, something like a wicked smile tugging at her mouth while she half leans into the truck’s aluminum side, one foot propped on the stairs that lead to the kitchenette inside. 

“Oh,” Ed manages. “Hi, Martha.” 

“You looking for sweets?” she asks, sporting the sly intonation of double meaning. Ed clamps up on the ascending bile, because his body’s still thinking of literal ice-cream. The slimy feeling of that sickly sugar coating his tongue.

He shakes his head. 

“Now, kid, don’t be shy. You can just ask,” comes another voice from right over him, where the truck’s register is at. There’s a buff, tan man with slicked back white hair and another, smaller bald guy by his side in a stained white apron. 

“I’m good.” 

“You sure?” the buff man keeps asking. “We got uppers, downers, screamers, laughers, runners, sleepers… Fuckers,” he intones, dipping his head and arching his eyebrows. “Good prices, too — you Greg’s little brother, yeah?”

“Not brothers,” Ed only half-grumbles, because the title does take him by surprise, if he’s in the mood for being completely honest. Martha snickers. 

“Well, now,” the man huffs, looking ahead into the night, at some undefined point in the vast horizon behind him. Neon bugs swarm around them. “I don’t mean by blood,” he says, licking his teeth. 

A few seconds tick by, and he’s having trouble remembering why he walked over here in the first place. He doesn’t quite recall ever meeting these people, even if they apparently have a common acquaintance. 

“Ed here doesn’t _do_ fun,” Martha informs the guy, breaking the silence, still smiling, still making direct eye contact. 

“Oh?” the smaller man chimes in with an extremely nasal voice. “What does a little kid want at a Carnival, then?” 

Little kid, huh. Sure, if it really comes down to that, he’ll always be misplaced.

Ed grinds his teeth, not knowing what he should say in such a weird situation. Such a weird context. Such a weird life. Thing is, he can’t just say ‘fuck it’ and walk back towards his side of the tracks to bury himself in that NatGeo 1987 issue about the marvels of quantum computers and saturated pictures of people wearing high-waisted pants he calls a ‘comfort zone’. He probably should, but he can’t, not without whatever shred of pride he’s got left being shattered in the face of his incapacity to just go through with things. 

He isn’t leaving without at least attempting to find Roy and making an effort to show his interest. 

He resolves to walking away after a clipped goodbye, to which Martha answers with nothing but a wink. 

Maybe gravity pulled him over. Maybe it’s the clothes he’s wearing — he gave himself permission to go looking through the stuff in Greg’s long-since abandoned room after Bradley had had a go at it. He found that most of his clothes were still there, and a pretty cool Misfits shirt was sitting along one of his dusty drawers, so he was wearing that right now, under his black button-up jacket. In retrospect he does feel pretty stupid for the fact that he can’t explain why he’s wearing that idiot’s clothes. He’d never let Ed live it down. If word gets to him it’ll be just as bad, he can practically hear his laugh in the distance — except it's probably someone else’s. 

He’s walked for an indefinite amount of time while trying to keep his eyes glued to the crushed plastic cups he sees upholstering the dirt ground. When he looks up there’s a familiar face, opening a smile that’s like another set of firecrackers. 

“Ed!” says Havoc, who’s holding a giant pink bunny plush and waving at him, speaking amidst a half-consumed cigarette. 

He walks over to him in added haste. “Hey,” he says once they’re about a meter away. 

Havoc nods his head in his general direction, “Hey yourself, did you just get here? — Jesus — hey can you hold this for me real quick?” he suddenly mutters, pushing the horrid bunny into Ed’s arms. 

He takes it without thinking and squishes its sides as a kind of motor reflex while Jean turns around to drop his half-finished cigarette on the dirt ground, blowing the remaining smoke out of his mouth as if he were telling a secret to the night’s air as his left shoe grinds it on the floor. 

“Fuckin’ security details, man,” he says after a second, looking at some undefined point beyond Ed’s shoulder, “Last year they had none of this added-rules bullshit and it was all a smoking area — _as an open-air space should be!_ ” he emphasizes, like making a final point in an argument with an invisible spirit. He then moves to pluck the bunny out of Ed’s arms, scoffing. 

“Anyway, took you long enough!” he continues, making his way further into the arena, probably expecting Ed to follow him — which is why he does, still walking on unsteady steps and hoping he read the cue correctly. “You’re actually right on time,” Jean chippers, perfectly ominous, yet not losing a single iota of pep. 

The pit of his stomach is a wild, self-suffocating snake with a jazz-crazy pulse. 

But Jean Havoc is all around a nice guy. His presence feels good, he looks good, he _is_ good. Oh, sure, he probably isn’t above peeing off a bridge or cheating on a test or making fun of someone falling down a flight of stairs. But he’s the type of guy to smile while looking you in the eye and acting like you’ve known each other for years, even if it’s probably the same amount of cordiality he extends to all of Mustang’s romantic interests, or whatever. None of them have historically lasted long, anyway. 

They arrive at one of the wooden makeshift benches by the whack-a-mole and as implied, the whole gang’s already there, gathered around an unsettlingly high amount of equally-haunting stuffed animals like the ones earned through close-range shooting fair games. 

“Hey,” Jean exclaims, “Look who I found.” 

Roy turns to him and instantly breaks into a smile — one he hasn’t gotten tired of looking at, for however long unspoken cultural rules allow him to, before bordering on downright creepy. He keeps the image stuck to the back of his eyelids, but it still never does the real thing justice. 

Right now, he can stare all he wants for the amount of time it takes him to walk over to the edge of the seat. All sorts of colourful undertones highlight Roy’s pale skin under the constant bombardment of the artificial gleam they’re surrounded by. 

“Oh, you’re here,” he says, already extending his right arm. 

Ed sees the empty space beside him and nearly fucking _swoons_. Riza Hawkeye smiles at him too, drinking pink lemonade from a straw and looming over what are probably all her own exploits won in Balloon and Dart. She’s likely run half of these stands out of business already — apparently much to Havoc’s dismay, as he presents his sole, awful pink bunny and places it on the other side of the table, like inaugurating his own pile.

Not a split second after he’s said hello to everyone and sat down next to Mustang, there’s a warm extremity enveloping him in that manner that he’s soon grown pretty used to. It seems to be Roy’s comfort-go-to-foolproof-position, probably too typical, probably too sappy, but he can’t really complain about it. For the first time in his life he’s actually starting to get the appeal of these mushy gestures. 

Winry’d asked him what the hell he’d done to Edward Elric. 

It was meant as a joke, and still, he’d thought he seriously hoped that fucking guy was dead in a ditch somewhere. Sitting around casual banter and dissonant laughs, he is so, so ready for highschool to be whatever normal, feel-good chaos edge-of-morality experience he’s heard it’s supposed to be and never thought he’d be able to have. Never in a thousand years. Namely because he hasn’t been of ‘highschool age’ for most of it. But right now? Right now shit is going dandy. 

Breda comes out of nowhere holding about five witch-green slurpees clustered with impressive deftness within his hands. “Alright, dinner time,” Hh solemnly announces, spreading them around the table with an equitable seriousness. 

“This… Is literally colored sugar,” Roy says. 

“Colored _ice_ sugar,” Breda corrects. “But I could ask the slurpee lady over there to sling a couple of them cherry shots on top to fit your needs,” he chuckles. 

“I think I’ll pass,” Roy grabs the cup by its rim with well-defined fingers, but Ed is quick to grab the container’s lower body, curling his own around it and pulling it back. 

“I’ll have it.” 

Roy’s mouth quirks at that. “Two of them?”

“Hell yeah,” Ed says, already getting busy with the first one, spreading a red plastic spoon around the lumpy texture and stabbing at the crushed ice. “Someone’s gotta appreciate the lime.” 

“ _Thank you_ ,” Breda complicity reveres, making something in his very core stutter at its own unexpected warmth. So this is what validation feels like, he thinks. He could gladly get fucking hooked on that, too. “See? What have I told you about this flavor?” 

“That it was created by a randomized modeling computer in the nineties in order to appeal to the citric taste of twelve-year-olds?” Hawkeye deadpans while taking another sip of her lemonade. Who knew drinking shit from a straw could be made a snarky gesture? Ed kind of wants to start taking notes. 

“Nu-uh,” Breda answers, “That it’s damn fruit- _astic_ and filled with potential,” 

Everyone groans in unison.

“Alright, so who’s coming to the haunted house?” Havoc cuts, leaning on the elbow he’s placed atop a flexed knee, propped up on the side of the bench. “Riza’s no fucking fun in those things because nothing scares her and she judges you for screaming —”

“— I do not —” Riza intones, bored as ever. 

“ _Silently_ judges you, with her silence. Because nothing scares her. Anyway, how ‘bout you, Heymans?” 

Breda huffs, “I like the food I’ve ingested; ain’t looking to throw up today.” 

“Scaredy-cat,” Havoc jabs. 

“Well I can’t be too precautious man, that place is fucking cursed.”

“Oh come _on_ , what happened was centuries ago!” Jean answers. 

“More like six years, exactly,” Breda bites back, a grim expression taking over his features. 

“What are you talking about?” Ed hears himself say, trying not to squirm at the way they all turn their heads to him like slingshots. 

The distant screams of people on the boomerang roller coaster some feet away fill the air for a moment. 

“Oh,” Mustang mutters after a couple of seconds, “That was before your time — before you moved here, I mean.” 

The ensuing silence is anything but comforting. Breda swiftly comes to the rescue after a few more moments of Ed flicking his gaze around the table’s surface, wondering if this is one of those shared-trauma-level sensitive subjects you’re not supposed to ask about. The ‘if you know, you know’ kind of thing. 

“There was a little six-year-old girl named Nina Tucker that disappeared inside the attraction a while back,” he says. 

“Well — to be fair, it’s all an alleged fact,” Mustang cuts in. 

“It shook the town pretty badly,” Riza reminisces, maintaining her normal levels of solemnity.

“Shit, man, we weren’t allowed to go outside after dark for like an entire two years after that, remember?” Havoc says, which causes an immediate wave of unanimous grunts to flow over the table. 

Suddenly, the contrast between the little group’s sour mood against the rest of the fair’s raging euphoria seems too dissonant. Eerie even. A light silence drapes over all of them like they’ve suddenly been propelled into a bubble of muffled silence, of tense memories. 

Ed leans further into the table, placing both his elbows on it as his eyes widen just the tiniest bit. 

“Anyhow,” Heymans sighs, taking it upon himself to give the closing statement, “She was never found after reportedly being seen for the last time while entering the house, the Carnival organizers got into some serious PR trouble. About three years after, it was allowed to re-open with added security and shit.”

“Added security that’s turned this splace into a fucking military state,” Jean grumbles. 

“You guys remember when people used to smoke up on the ferris wheel?” Riza interjects, a canny smile pulling at her lips to which everyone reacts with unabashed glee. 

“Those were the days, you’d wait until you were nearing the top to light up,” Havoc chuckles. 

“Oh, and people used to see if they could hold the smoke in for as long as it took to give the whole turn,” Roy muses. 

“Yeah, yeah,” Jean nearly chokes on his own laughter before abruptly turning straight to face Ed, “Nowadays? The operators fucking check your pockets before letting you up, new regulation or whatever the hell.” 

“Anyway,” Heymans says, “Falman and Fuery got fucking spooked for life after that and haven’t returned since, in case you were wondering where they were. And honestly? I don’t blame ‘em. Plus, the haunted house actors are real pieces of shit, but they always have been. Everyone suspected the staff in that place when the Nina ordeal happened — I’m dead serious!” he screeches in response to Mustang’s unbelieving eye-roll. “Tell ‘em about your uncle, Havoc — they don’t check for criminal records when hiring you, right?”

Havoc rolls his eyes, as well. “Yeah, but the guy only did like two nights of county prison for petty theft.” He takes a breath of air that rapidly comes out as a growing cackle, his eyes glazed over with the clear image of whatever memory he’s digging out for the sake of added shock-value. “He says that the interview only consisted of one question: ‘How fast can you run?’” 

That does it. 

It ignites the spark responsible for tugging the corners of Ed’s mouth into what probably looks as an unsettling type of grin. He hopes no one sees it. 

“Holy fuck,” he states. 

Roy hums with his cheek lazily pressed against his free wrist. “Yeah.”

“Let’s go,” Ed says, lightly pushing into his side. 

“Hm?”

“Yeah, let’s fucking go,” he eagerly repeats before Havoc claps his hand in triumph. 

“Fuck — _yes_! That’s the attitude,” 

He’s about to start getting up when a heavy voice stomps into them with no form of warning. He hears some sleazy introductory sentences. It’s Halcrow. 

Construction-block-jaw Halcrow. 

“My man,” he smiles while clapping his hand into Havoc’s, closing it on a fist and bringing him in for a callous hug. 

He moves on to Breda before turning towards Roy, who simply cocks his head in his direction, from what Ed can see through peripheral vision. It seems to have a halting effect on the guy, because his smile gets a tense edge to it and his torso sort of pauses, like he was about to lean in for a casual handshake, but thought better of it. Ed’s just glad he isn’t being addressed or looked at, save for a quick flick of his gaze that doesn’t linger enough to become judgemental. 

He knows the entirety of the football team (present company excluded, as far as he can tell) are all knee-deep in the repressed trauma from their homophobic up-bringing. Ed’s never remained in a single place for too long, but he guesses he would’ve been no better being raised in the endless green expanse of the rural baptist lands where he and Al were born. 

Halcrow keeps up the confident front while reaching into his varsity jacket’s side pocket — the one that all of these jocks wear like they simply do not own any other items of clothing — to extract a little rectangular ziploc, and that’s exactly when Ed starts feeling like a fan, steadily whirling over a group of people who’re tossing shit around without a care in the world. 

There’s some sort of colored powder inside. He opens it after looking over his shoulder for a second, Breda leans back to check that the coast is clear. 

“Bone apple tea, then,” Heymans mutters excitedly before licking his index finger and dipping it inside, bringing it to his mouth and rubbing the stuck powder onto the side of his tongue afterwards. 

Halcrow’s conniving smile grows wider as the little baggie is then offered towards the middle. Havoc goes next, repeating the lick-and-stick motion Breda made, Riza shakes her head as it goes through her. Halcrow clicks his tongue, but the fact that he’s still showing all his teeth is clearly one of those strategies shit-eating people with shit-eating grins have for deterring others from getting angry at their bullshit. Anything you say about it will be answered with the classical ‘ _I’m just kidding! Can’t you tell?_ ’

Riza doesn’t seem too bothered about it. Then again, she’s like a stone wall. 

It arrives next to him, and before he can compute, Roy’s sticking his finger into the bag without contrition. He proceeds to rub in on his gums, loudly smacking his lips straight after. 

“I always forget how much I hate this,” he says, running his tongue over his teeth in a disgusted gesture. Halcrow laughs. 

“Little sacrifices,” he quips. 

Then, obviously, the guy keeps his hand moving in the same direction’s inertia until it arrives right in front of him. 

He looks down at the open baggie, the ‘o’ shaped polyethylene resealable lips. He looks up at Halcrow’s wolfish grin, then back down again. 

They don’t know each other, not really. 

Ed knows who he is based on the name imprinted on most of the school’s sports trophies; the wild rumors that accompany any jacked, popular high school predator like it’s a price tag around their ankle and the smarmy yearbook pictures where he appears straight-backed and wearing an ironed flannel button-up that screams Do Not Trust This Motherfucker. He’s exactly the kind of person Mr. Hughes and his second case worker were so worried about him having to face as a natural consequence of becoming a Sophomore at fucking twelve. 

So it’s only natural that Ed’s spit sort of gets stuck in his throat at the moment and his fingers start tingling with the premonition of going completely numb. He clenches his hands, grateful for always placing them on his lap under the table out of habit. The rest of the group goes still. 

“What is it,” he manages, hating, loathing, _abhorring_ the moment. Were it a material thing, he’d go for it’s jugular.

Halcrow’s smile goes lopsided, strange, his chest contracts. He loathes it. 

“Scraps,” he says, licking his lips. “We don’t like letting any go to waste, y’know,” 

Boy, does he.

He looks over at Havoc, who gives him one of those tight-lipped smiles usually dispensed to people or things or animals that inspire great pity in you. Except he shouldn’t be smiling, not like that. And the rest should be holding their breaths in, and none of this should be such a big fucking deal. 

He forces himself to swallow. 

“It’s MDMA,” Roy finally speaks an inch above him. His voice isn’t tense, per se, it’s just… Emotionless. Steady.

“Oh,” Ed nearly whispers. “I’m — I’m good. Thank you.” And internally cringes at himself for the formality. He feels the side of Mustang’s shin press against his under the table, but it’s probably just a casual shift without any particular meaning. 

Halcrow snorts. “What is _up_ with you all? One half party-monsters, one half the straight-edge children of Christ brigade?” He addressed the group at large with a forced cackle. “C’mon Mustang, tell ‘im to live a little —”

“I think we’re cool for now, dude,” Havoc interjects. 

“Oh, what? The PG-13 experience ended at around five, last I checked,” he goes on, probably a jab at Ed’s age, probably one at him as a whole. 

Ed feels the knot on his back, tensing his shoulders and telling him to keep his eyes glued to the table, like daring to make eye contact would be an act of insubordination or some awful shit like that. All he knows is confrontation is a no-go. 

He remembers what being locked in a room surrounded by narrow-eyed, cross-armed, self-loving assholes nearly double his age feels like from that time in which his numerical abilities got _discovered_ in middle school, and the Mathletes club president was a scrawny white dude whose head nearly grazed the ceiling and who laughed at everything he said, even if it was some shit like ‘I learned about algebra because there was nothing better to read at the home’s library’, which was also more like a single splintered bookshelf at the very end of the room. Point is, he hadn’t meant it as a joke. 

They sat him down in the middle of a classroom, gave him a #2 pencil, and let the rounds begin, telling him to ‘ _Teach these senior punks how simultaneous equations are actually done,_ ’, which he fucking did. For two hours. No water breaks, no rest. A circus monkey with an Unaccompanied Minor tag pinned to the front of his sweater and a bunch of high school so-called prodigies scrunching up their noses at him for solving every problem correctly within the minute. 

So much for protecting older people’s pride. 

“Roy,” Halcrow turns his persuading face to Mustang without missing a beat, still smirking too wide. “I wouldn’t have thought you had a thing for uptight.”

Ed just wants to duck under the table and hope Roy lets him hide between his legs and hates himself for it. 

This isn’t like that time — at least it isn’t supposed to be. He can speak for himself, he can be spoken to directly. Fuck.

“Don’t bring your rejection sensitivity into this,” Roy suddenly says, clear as day and assertive like a silver sword, yet seemingly unruffled. 

“What?” Halcrow chuckles. 

“He said,” Roy raises his voice, “He’s good. I believe that roughly translates to ‘ _No_ ’, according to my knowledge of the English language.” Had Ed been a better version of himself, one upgraded and self-possessed, he would’ve jammed his elbow into the ribcage next to him without a single shred of regret. He would’ve stomped on Roy’s foot as a means of preventing the civil war that is assured to go down over one of the most stupid motives ever recorded. 

The Great Emu War has got nothing on the idiocy of the macho pride he’s somehow managed to surround himself with tonight. 

He sees Halcrow’s chest puff out, feels Mustang’s hand slightly curl over his shoulder, hears the air being smothered into their tense stomachs as everyone just sits and waits. It feels like it’s been a long time coming. 

But he exists, is the thing, not just as a defenseless child that’s a depository for other people’s anger and frustration, not just as a token sidekick that serves the sole purpose of propelling Roy’s righteous anger, letting him save the day, over and over. 

The bag is still practically in front of him, and Ed thinks about how Halcrow’s father owns half the town. Supermarket franchises and mall construction sites and distribution companies. _Owns_. He’s gonna have to disappear, isn’t he? He’s gonna have to start digging up the paperwork needed to get himself relocated within the foster system again. Winry’ll understand. She’ll call him a dumbass and cuff his head with a hammer and he’ll deserve it, but she’ll come around eventually. Roy doesn’t give a shit because he’s safe, safe in the way you can only be when you categorically belong somewhere. 

Him? He’s lucky for every step taken. 

Suddenly Mustang’s arm doesn’t feel that soothing. 

Seconds drag themselves on mud and once again, everyone is just plain silent until Edward Elric _cracks_ under the impotent pressure inherent in being a damsel in distress. 

He mutters something under his breath that even he can’t quite understand before sticking his index in his mouth and dragging it over his wet tongue and it comes out somewhat green because colorant is disgusting but it doesn’t matter because he extends his hand and dives it into the powder. The little bag crumples and it’s like the only sound he’s ever known as his digit swirls around, coating itself completely. 

He licks his finger clean and it does taste like shit. But it isn’t worse than, say, oxycodone, and he has it for breakfast almost every day, so he brushes it off the flesh wall on his inner cheek and swallows the arid taste and squirms around the splintered seating. 

He makes the mistake of validating Halcrow’s self-satisfied smirk with a prolonged glance, but he manages to hold it, this time. _Fuck you_ , he silently communicates. 

When he finally leaves in a cloud of self-satisfaction and steady stomps, the silence doesn’t break until he looks at Roy and the stark shine in his raven eyes. His pinched eyebrows. 

“What the fuck did you just do?” he says. Equal parts stunned and confused and worried.

“Molly,” Ed answers.

He’s not into drugs, really. He’s not. It isn’t functional, it isn’t fun or harmless and he knows this too fucking well. He knows this better than anyone in the world. He’d dare say he’s the only one who knows, and he’s always known a little too much for his age. That’s at least what they’ve always told him. 

He knew all about fucking and murder and abandonment since he was about six. He knew about fire hazards and blood infections and adoption mechanics where most kids didn’t even know how to work a shoelace. He knows about micro-dosing and early college applications and personal finance and everything there is to know about fucking methylenedioxymethamphetamine. M, e, t, h, y, l, e, n, e, d, i, o, x, y, m, e, t, h, a, m, p, h, e, t, a, m, i, n, e. Also known as MDM fucking A. These people sport it around like it’s such a novelty.

He swirls the aftertaste around his mouth, the agitation everyone looks at him with. Maybe something like this had also been a long time coming. Thing is, it’s nobody’s fucking business, is it? It doesn’t involve everyone’s concerned eyes and their tense jawlines. It’s not like anyone really cares beyond the fact that they’ve just witnessed a real-life textbook example of risky peer-pressure and all they can feel for him is commiseration. 

Roy’s expression doesn’t let up. He blinks. “Why?”

Ed’s shrug is immediate. Growingly exasperated. Angry. 

What is he supposed to say, other than ‘ _Because I can_ ’? The truth is he has no fucking clue where that just came from. Maybe Greg possessed all of his clothes before leaving Dante’s and his spirit is currently living vicariously through Ed’s limbs. He’s gonna stick to that theory. This is what he gets for usurping his abandoned shirts. 

He soon finds Mustang’s startled gaze suffocating — for all the wrong reasons. So what if he’s younger than most? He’s seen little children get dragged out of hospital rooms in plastic bags while awaiting his own turn. 

So what if he’s socially incapacitated? He’s not in any way innocent. It isn’t his fault his cheeks warm at the smallest of provocations. He can stand his ground, he can stick by his impulse-driven decision. He can get to be stupid for one — _one_ — fucking night. His body is his, only in the sense that it’s the only one he’s got, it malfunctions and itches and hurts but it’s a ride or die situation and it’s his choice. His. 

He can keep going. He keeps going and it doesn’t matter how he manages — that’s not for them to fucking worry about. He’s about to be really high in less than half an hour. He’s at a fair with his teenage catalogue-model of a date and a few feet away from the site in which a horrible, mysterious tragedy took place and you know what? He is kinda morbid. 

“C’mon.” He grabs Roy’s hand before the guy gets a single, infuriating word out and stands. “Let’s go to that haunted house,” he determines. 

“Wh — Right now?” Roy stammers and stumbles behind him, thankfully not putting up much of a fight. 

“Right now,” he answers, trying not to grind his teeth at the sheer nervousness that threatens to rip him apart from the inside. “I wanna see how fast the fuckers actually run.” 

He doesn’t look back, he doesn’t care what they think. He doesn’t. At least he’s in the process of telling himself exactly that before Roy pulls his hand back and forcibly halts their dissonant steps. He turns around with molten fire threatening to make him choke because Roy is still looking at him like he doesn’t know who he is. 

“Wait, wait,” he breathes. They stand facing each other. Everything around them moves. “What was that? Are you alright?”

Ed looks away for a second. He looks back. “Are you?” 

Roy pauses with his mouth half open and an answer dangling off the tip of his tongue, but not quite making it out. The ferris wheel’s lights drown in the darkened sea on his retinas. 

Roy blinks, his lower lip slightly twitches. “I… Maybe not?” he finally says, which… Isn’t something he expected. 

Ed’s still pretty much locked on the ‘fight, then flight’ response and his hand clenches in Roy’s as his tongue repetitively runs over the back of his teeth. His jaw tingles in agitation. 

Roy clenches back. For no reason, but it doesn’t matter because his heart’s beating against the roof of his mouth. ‘ _What the fuck did you just do?_ ’ 

Try too hard, maybe. Die over wanting to prove himself. Who knows, who cares. It’s done, it’s in his system, it runs through his spine and seizes his stomach. He doesn’t want to go through it alone, he hopes Roy didn’t find that too pathetic and sticks with him through the night, at least. Just for tonight. And when the clock strikes one minute past midnight, well. He’ll take it from there. 

Same as he always has. 

“Okay,” Roy exhales after a moment, tucking his lips into his mouth and nibbling on them — nerves. “Okay, look.” He closes the distance between them and cups his cheeks, his face, his entire head between his hands. He drills his eyes into his and Ed feels his lids start to itch, he blinks, adjusting to the closeness, to the pink moisture on Roy’s lips. “You’ve never done this.”

Ed jerks his head away with an annoyed grunt, or attempts to, anyway, because Mustang’s hands are steady, warm and all-encompassing. He looks away, but Roy’s palms are placed almost right over his ears and the erratic noise from all the teenage heartbreak that’s going on outside — with all the overflowing trash cans and held back tears — is muffled, like above a surface he can see but doesn’t have to interact with. 

He exhales sharply, because he didn’t expect he needed that — to be kinda deaf for a few seconds. To just… Hear less. 

He looks back at Roy. “I meant that you’ve never — you’ve —” 

“No, but it’s not like I haven’t done other shit, okay,” Ed interrupts, marveling at how his voice bounces back from Roy’s palms. 

“I didn’t say that.” 

“You implied I haven’t,” Ed answers.

“But I know it’s not that you’d never,” Roy says.

“What the fuck are we talking about?” Ed says. 

“I don’t know,” Roy is searching his eyes. Pity. He’ll never find anything. 

Ed chews on what he’d been meaning to tell someone — anyone, whoever fell within ear-shot first — for an incalculable amount of time. 

It’s at this point that he realizes there’s probably too many layers to him, he realizes he’s been keeping secrets without really meaning to. They piled up when he wasn’t looking and eventually, something’s gotta give. 

“‘M not clean,” he intones with Roy’s hands still warming his cheeks and harsh nocturnal wind dancing around their frames. 

Mustang’s eyes crinkle a little bit at that, and Ed wants to be disappointed at the relieved huff that leaves his nose, but the truth is he couldn’t possibly expect the guy to get the full meaning of what he’s saying — what he’s really saying, because the truth of the matter is that he’s saying too little. Almost nothing at all. 

“Well, I don’t think any of us are,” Roy says, and Ed doesn’t go on with a ‘ _No, you don’t get it, you don’t understand. I’ve seen too much. I’ve been around the world without ever leaving this tiny state. I’m fifteen and have the joints of a war veteran. One time, when I was ten, I turned a corner and caught the orphanage’s superintendent masturbating at the end of the hall. He looked directly at me and didn’t break eye contact while coming on the floor. When I was thirteen, Greg gave me my first tab of Vicodin and all I had to do to keep getting those for free was cover for him whenever he snuck out of the house. He left the tablets under my bed’s duvet and I was like his hamster pet. I didn’t mind. That week and a half I was placed in middle school while the administration went over my examinations for determining AP, I spent figuring out that snorting was faster than swallowing and did only that during recess. That discovery felt groundbreaking. You don’t get it._ ’ 

He doesn’t say shit. The fact is Roy hasn’t stopped touching him, and come to think of it he’s always seemed inclined towards physical contact for some reason he seriously can’t fathom but isn’t here to question. He can let himself sink into the knowledge that this is as good as it’s gonna get, for the time being. 

“Quit stallin’ then,” he answers instead, moving back on his feet so they get a move-on. “Let’s go. Let’s go.” He motions towards the haunted house. Roy follows but doesn’t take his gaze off of him. He should trip and fall for not looking at his feet, yet somehow, he doesn’t. 

They should both fall down and eat shit for walking like conjoined twins and not looking at anything else, yet somehow, they don’t. They go past the entrance and disappear into a clown’s open mouth. 

*

“Take my phone away,” Ed implores. He’s already panting but it’s surely not been longer than twenty minutes. Maybe it was all the sprinting. Roy is the absolute worst horror house partner there is, he only knows that much. 

Ed chuckles into the chilled air and lets the wind reshape his hair, his clothes, his skin. 

“Take it,” he repeats, handing the dark block away, pushing it into his pale hands. 

“What?” Roy pants back. 

“I’m gonna call Al and say something really stupid, I — here, just — hide it somewhere I don’t know about.” He makes Roy’s fingers curl around it with his own, proceeding to push him away while they keep walking towards a mysterious destination. 

Did shit get even _louder_ since they went in?

“And… Then you’ll try to find it?” Roy says, all huge eyes and quirking mouth. 

“ _No_ ,” Ed moans, because even if the bubbling at the base of his throat doesn’t think it — this is serious. He feels the urge to communicate, to overshare, like the mush inside his body is pushing out of his every pore and he doesn’t find the time to push it all back. He looks up at the moon — huge, yellow, rabbithole. Rabbithole. Rabbithole. 

Or is it just a streetlamp? An enormous, cold, round light that’s zeroing into planet earth at an astounding speed. They’re gonna die —

“Ed —” He collides with something warm, his face gets stuffed with the rough cotton of somebody else’s sweater and a warm gasp is stuck in his throat. They turn to him and quirk an eyebrow before he gets a chance to apologize, so fast to judge. He doesn’t get to tell them ‘ _Jesus, I’m not an insect, alright,_ ’ before Roy comes up behind him and grabs his arms, moving him away. 

“Be careful,” he says to the shell of his ear. His voice trickles down his shoulder, down his spine, Ed squirms away, snickering. 

“You have to watch your step, all the way — Ed.” Mustang’s hands are at him again. His shoulders, his hair. “Hey, listen to me. Don’t get too close to the shooting games. Don’t pay attention to the music. And don’t pull away from me, you stay right by my side, you hear? Edward!”

Ed doesn’t mind the little fluttering wings on his fingers, his feet feel repelled by the ground, he balances his weight unevenly, back and forth, left and right. He can see _everything_. 

“What the fuck are you laughing at?” Roy says, he grabs his shoulders, squeezes. It’s strange because he feels hyper-aware of the sensation, like it has blanket over blanket of meaning, translated to his brain, translated back to him as a mild shock wave of consciousness. But he doesn’t mind it, this time. His flesh feels easy on his bones, his bones easy on his flesh, he’s held together by warm mush. 

Ed snickers. “Hey — no,” Roy says. “It’s not funny, you — hell. You took too much, didn’t you? You took too much.” Maybe. He did push his finger into the bag all the way to his knuckle. But Roy’s eyes are the darkest shade of raven pitch black; a moonless night; the bottom of the ocean, they don’t know what light is. It’s a plum mirror that absorbs the Carnival’s aurora, it eats it up, it steals to make it all drown in the inky puddles he has for eyes and disappears. 

Ed’s gaze widens in unabashed awe. 

“What about you?” Ed brings a finger to his marbled cheek, it’s cold enough that the skin under his digit follows it’s imprint with a pink streak. “You’re _swallowing_ the fucking fair, Roy,” he cackles. “Holy shit,” he breathes. 

“What?” Roy shuts his eyes, opens them, shuts them again — like a feather landed inside, like he’s going to cry. 

“And you’re such a — you’re so scared,” Ed marvels, seeing all too clearly. He pushes his finger back up Roy’s cheek, like cleaning an invisible smudge. Roy looks at him, then away at nothing. 

“You’re blubbering.” His shoulder twitches. 

“And you’re scared shitless,”

“Ed, just take my fucking hand and don’t wander.” Ed sort of leans back because he’s not used to hearing Roy swear, not because he minds it. 

“But it wasn’t _real_ ,” he tells him, opening and closing both fists at his side. “That chainsaw wasn’t real, I didn’t know you got so jumpy,” he tries biting down on his shitty smile, he really, really does. 

Roy rolls his eyes. “I didn’t. It was simply unexpected — they came out of the walls, I didn’t — Stop. Laughing. Stop it.” 

Ed’s short-term memory hands him the image of being picked up by him, of being near tossed over Roy’s shoulder as the guy made a run for it whilst they got chased by all sorts of maniacal creatures, filling the space with a muttered string of hissed curses, similar to all the ones that had him swallowing soap not so long ago as he repeated them in close succession to himself. Dante pinned his head down under the sink hoping he’d learned a lesson on “cleanspeak” and all he thought about was ‘ _Shit. Fatherfucker. Fuck. Goddamn. Horseshit. Cocksucker. Crap._ ’ 

Right now, all he feels like doing is laughing to make up for all the times in which he hadn’t been able to. 

Laughing at the fact that the moon is seconds away from colliding with this lonely little planet of theirs and nobody seems to care how fucking big it is. _It’s just October_ , he thinks. Damn. October. 

It’s cold enough that his teeth should be clattering, but his body becomes a barrier and doesn’t let it in. He keeps grinning. 

“Stop,” Roy continues like it’s not a lost cause proven by the fact that his own lips are now pulling his face into a sharpened smile, even with how hard he seems to be trying to bite on it, to halt. “It’s not funny,” he mumbles, still clenching his mouth to not show any teeth — any form of surrender. 

Ed snorts. But the dam only breaks until they’re at the top of the ferris wheel, about two hours later and at their literal peak, trying to keep their restless limbs in check, sitting on their hands. 

“Look,” Roy tells him. “At our great horizon.” 

Townhall. Library. Highschool. Mall. All of it dies out at around nine-o-clock. It’s not until December that storefronts give themselves permission to keep some lights on after dark, the flickering little bulbs of Christmas. Until then, though, this is what they have — it’s not much. Not much at all. 

“That’s so fucking depressing,” Ed deadpans. He looks to his side and down at the rest of the fair, at tiny people walking like ants around the main attractions. It feels like they’re all moths clinging to a dying lightbulb — the last dying lightbulb in what seems like an entire country. What a time to be alive. 

It’s not until Roy’s snort turns into a cackle that turns into near-sobbing, cough-inducing laughter that he realizes he said that last bit out loud. He laughs with Roy. They laugh at each other’s crazed mirth and then one of them is tearing up, but he can’t really tell because the closeness of their lips makes it difficult to differentiate their faces or where the wet spots are coming from. 

“I want to bite your cheek,” Roy says between impermanent kisses. 

Ed delivers clipped giggles that trip on themselves. “Do it.”

“No.”

“Wimp,” Ed answers. 

“I’d never, ever, ever forgive myself.” 

“ _C’mon_ ,” Ed pushes. “Eat it.” 

“I can’t,” Roy grins, “I can’t. Never.” 

Ed takes too much pleasure in grabbing the sides of Roy’s face, the better to rub his cheek against him as his giggling objections get lost in his skin. 

By the third turn, they’ve been kissing for an eternity. Ed’s laying on his back with a warm tongue exploring his. The wheel stops again and their individual metal cart swings about in the ether, propelled by their own movement, too, as they drown on each other’s hot spit. Ed’s leg dangles in the air, Roy’s hands are at either side of his shoulders when his mouth starts making its way down the expanse of his throat, causing him to gripe up towards the night’s sky, curling his finger’s on the fabric of Mustang’s jacket. He wants to keep laughing because it feels too good considering they’re suspended mid-wheel, mid-Carnival in the middle of ass-fuck nowhere. 

It’s likely anyone could see them if they cared to squint enough but he doesn’t care because they started out as a pair of head-fucked exhibitionists, anyway, and he’s literally above them all. He hiccups through continued snickers. 

Roy may be hot shit around other people, but only he knows about the coward that can’t stand any jump scares and has a secret mother-hen hiding within his character. He thinks he wouldn’t have it any other way. He lets his hands travel upwards, around the nape of Mustang’s neck, he buries his fingers in his hair and swears he can feel their conjoined, deranged pulses while they breathe in each other’s mouth like there’s not enough oxygen in the world. 

They get off and Roy tugs at his sleeve. He breaks the kiss he’d pulled Ed into as they stumble towards the exit. “My car’s right over there,” he says, “Wanna get out of here?”

“Huh?” Ed mumbles near his Adam’s apple. It isn’t right until Roy surrounds him with both arms and pulls him to his chest that he gets his meaning — Ed jumps at the contact, but doesn’t break away, feeling the warm hardness on Roy’s groin against his hip bone, feeling his own press back against Roy’s leg.

Roy plants a kiss to the top of his head. “We don’t have to,” he says, but hugs him a little harder with trembling arms. Ed gets it — he’s shaking too, but it’s probably got nothing to do with the cold, because this temperature hasn’t got shit on them. Sometimes it snows around here, sometimes it doesn’t. They’re not really far enough north for anything significant to happen this time of year. Even if it did, they’re both running high fevers and their bones rattle with intensity. 

They keep walking like each other’s shadow for a moment and Ed greedily breathes in Roy’s smell, it’s amazing. He turns sideways and presses his ear to his chest plate. Roy’s heart is going so fast he can’t even keep track — but it’s at the same time steady, strong, hard, sure of itself and what it’s doing with the things they’ve ingested, pumping his boiling blood everywhere, making their bodies fizz. He lets his eyes fall closed and revels in the line of contact where their bodies are touching — face to chest, stomach to stomach, dick to leg. Shit, fuck. He’s about to combust. 

And then, of course, it’s not until Roy calls his name with some uncertainty that he realizes he’d started lightly humping against him in the middle of his drug-induced haze. He’s high enough that the humiliation of it doesn’t hit him right away, but he still apologizes, cussing. They’re still in public. 

Roy grins and tucks a lock of hair behind his ear, not letting him hide his face in his hands. 

“So should we go?” Ed doesn’t say ‘yes’, he doesn’t say ‘no’, he doesn’t say ‘I don’t know, I don’t really understand what’s happening,’ and they start making their way out into the somber expanse of the parking lot. He sees Roy’s fingers fumble and shake as he rummages for the keys and presses the button that makes yellow lights sear through his vision. 

All too soon, they’re inside. The door immediately shuts everything out and he feels his head reel in a million different directions with the lingering buzz of the stimuli they just left. He adjusts to the silence as they shuffle around the back seat, breathing heavily. 

Roy wastes no time and starts kissing him again, he responds because he likes it; he really, really, really likes it. When Mustang hovers over him again and ventures a hand over the hem of his jeans, his own hand shoots down to halt it. 

“ _Wait,_ ” he nearly chokes. But the hand he was stopping isn’t even there anymore, instead Roy’s holding it up while blinking down at him, breathing through parted lips but otherwise completely still. 

Ed sees Roy’s soft fingers curl into themselves and retract back to his side. “Sorry,” he says with a little, unfaltering smile. “Is that… Should I not have done that?” 

Ed works his lips through muted words. He turns to look out the windshield, over at where all sorts of colors are still blasting away. He doesn’t have any way of gauging what time it is. 

A few fingers trail down his cheek. “Hey,” Roy says, a lot softer. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean… I thought you wanted—”

“It’s just —” he starts, stops, swallows. His heart feels like it’s vacated, like he’s still floating too high up, too far away. “I’ve…” he whispers through agitated breaths. “I’ve never…” 

The night goes on without them, that’s for damn sure. The godforsaken wasps and crickets that sometimes keep him company are all around the place, stuttering to death after a lifespan that’s too short, after watching him tip-toe around the edges of something essential, something that felt like a black hhole inside his being, something he never liked thinking about, but had to be dealt with. Eventually. 

Eventually. 

Roy looks and looks and keeps doing just that. Black eyes that suck him in while he feels himself dissolving. 

“I’ve never…” he repeats, even fainter this time, like he’s gotten distracted, trailing off, going somewhere else… Walking away.

The fingers on his cheek are now knuckles, they brush themselves up and down the frame of his jaw. The whisper of skin-on-skin is all he can hear for a moment as Roy’s thumb caresses his cheekbone, then runs it’s pad over the tender bag under his right eye. He likes doing that quite a lot, too, tracing a digit over the mark of his exhaustion. 

“That’s okay,” he finally whispers back before dipping in to kiss the trail his hand has left on the side of Ed’s face. Eye, cheekbone, jaw, chin. It’s insufferably pleasant to be paid this much attention to, and the seating beneath his head doesn’t let him run away from it. 

Roy pulls a mere inch away and breathes in a way that ruffles his eyelashes.

“You can practice on me.” He drapes the words over him like a sultry blanket, and that’s all he gets before Mustang’s moving down, scooting slightly away and back towards his legs, his trembling legs. 

Ed sucks a shallow breath in and keeps his eyes fixed on the car’s ceiling as he feels Roy’s warmth travel further down. The scars snake up towards the middle of his thigh — a little higher, even. He hears his zipper being pulled down but if he stops several inches from his knees, it’ll probably be alright. His heart plummets back into his ribcage at this time but there’s not time for a heart attack, no time at all. Time itself counts only by the way his jeans start sliding off, leaving his boxers out and both his arms entirely numb at his sides. His lungs feel like they’re being constricted, dropped in a tub of rapidly drying cement. 

Mustang places a deft palm over his groin and it’s like he jumps out of his skin, muscle and bone and nervous system all separate from one another then come tumbling back into his flesh with a startled moan. 

“Alright?” he hears Roy huff lowly, the bastard’s probably smiling right now. 

Ed doesn’t look. He can’t — he can’t. His clothes aren’t completely off, that’s good. His shirt — not his, Greg’s. Greg’s shirt hasn’t rolled up. Greg’s shirt still meets the hem of his boxers, which are still over him. This is still fine. He manages to hum while nodding a little, hoping it gets the message across. He wishes he had something to hold onto besides the cold seating under him when Roy plants a sudden kiss to his inner thigh over the thin cotton layer. He flinches again, almost automatically. Spit has accumulated at the top of his throat but he can’t swallow, it just stays there, bubbling up. 

He doesn’t know what’s supposed to happen, what noises he’s meant to do, what form of expression is usually allowed. Should he touch Roy? His face? His shoulders? Should he be undressing himself? Closing his eyes feels like an entirely wrong move and he’s never watched porn to at least have some sort of reference. 

He first learned about sex in the pages of some archaic old anatomy book he found lying around the house, his first house. He saw odd diagrams of strange organs, he remembers something about his mom slapping it shut and throwing it over the top shelf. Then, he learned a thing or two about the wild stories nurses used to spew about their weekend escapades while assuming he couldn’t hear them because he also couldn’t move or speak or pee by himself, at first. They talked over his bed while changing the sheets and parchments on his arm and leg, ripping the packets for new gauze while chewing on gum and laughing at each other’s stories. They were graphic. They were weird. He learned about sex in the orphanage, he learned about how dicks were equivalent to bananas and about how you could get all sorts of gnarly infections from it and wave your youthful life goodbye. He learned about how superintendents like to masturbate in lonely corners and look over their shoulders and smile. 

When fingers curl themselves into the only garment that now protects him from total nudity, and start pulling it down, he finds that he doesn’t have it in himself to be still. He chokes on his spit, his eyes shoot open, he looks down. Mustang’s fingers pause and his smile falls after a few seconds. 

His cheeks are still pink from the exertion of running around like a farm animal with an acute anxiety disorder for who knows how long. It could’ve been more than four hours. 

Mustang stops, he licks his lips in that way that only communicates apprehension and props himself back, held up by both elbows. 

“You’re not getting into this,” he says, and the tone itself is not accusing, but lying on his back with his pants half-down and shaking like a leaf even though the car is considerably warmer than the ambient outside, Ed feels sticky with overwhelming shame. It’s a horrible, humid sort of feeling, one he’s felt many times before, but never quite like this. 

He doesn’t want to talk about the scar tissue that doesn’t let him do anything. It’s stupid and embarrassing and won’t get him anywhere because it’s likely Roy already knows. Because they all know. They all whisper about it. So much for making a point out of not being afraid. 

“… I’m sorry,” he says to the windshield. Thankfully, his voice doesn’t break. 

Silence clenches it’s fist around his throat.

“Was it something I did?” Roy asks after a couple of moments, voice guarded. 

He immediately shakes his head. Mustang looks down at him, on him, perhaps. His eyes fix themselves on the undeniable sign of arousal that’s still poking out from within Ed’s boxers before dragging his gaze back to his face. He’s in hell. 

“I don’t understand,” Roy softly says. 

“Sorry,” he repeats in a ragged voice instead of going on a tangent about his sorry little life. There it goes again — that fucking word. Little. 

He swallows successfully this time, while pushing himself up on the heels of his hands. They look at each other for a searing second. He doesn’t know which one of them is the first to look away, but his drum for a heart starts spewing venom into his system as he hears Roy’s disappointed breathing, tastes the change in mood. Yeah, he’s no relationship expert, but this type of heavy breathing isn’t good. It just isn’t. 

Mustang starts shifting and before he knows it, Ed’s reaching out to his wrist, scooting up closer to where Roy sits on his knees, the bulge of his dick right at his face height. 

“I could —” he starts, but feels the terms get trapped merely as an idea, never making it to the actual word. 

He can’t rip his mind from under the theoretical framework of just how dirty people his own age are expected to talk. 

He thinks of things like length and width and the fact that he’s never really seen anyone’s cock before, let alone put one in his mouth. He might be quite shit at it. 

It might make everything worse. 

His fingers trail a belt loop, anyway. Between the concept and reality, between a motion and an act, lies a shadow. He swallows heavily. 

But Roy takes his wrist and slowly tears his hand off. “No, it’s… I’m okay,” he tells him, tone unreadable. He proceeds to run his fingers through a loose strand of Ed’s hair, albeit a more fleeting, absentminded gesture. Ed strains not to lean into the touch. 

He only looks up to meet his eyes after several moments of clenching around the humid cluster of prickling tears that’s threatening to rip out of his chest. Frustrated. 

Fuck, he didn’t want this. 

The feeling comes out of nowhere and is made that much more intense by his already heightened senses, like his nerve terminations have all been sharpened with a rusty blade. 

He twitches, then wordlessly nods, and just like that, Roy talks again with the sort of casualness that can only be faked. “Should we, uh, go back?” he suggests. 

Ed nods again. Mustang’s eyes limit themselves to keep reflecting everything they see. Ed thinks of one word. Unsolvable. 

Multiple, simultaneous equations that encapsulate a constellation of meaning. Locked away.

He moves back, opens the door and stands right outside with a hand stretched on the car as if to steady himself, letting a rush of cold air in while Ed scrambles to pull his jeans back up, trembling fingers fidgeting with the zipper. He takes Roy’s offered hand while making his way out and jumps at the collision of the door being pushed closed behind him. 

They walk in silence.

Back inside, Roy says something about taking a piss. As the full-grown man he is, he doesn’t go for the porta-potty area, but rather selects the back of some abandoned trees a few feet away from the main ticket booth. Ed stands dumbly for about three seconds as Roy walks away before the purple cluster at his right catches his eye — again. 

He feels like he hasn’t been breathing right, so maybe a little walk will do the trick. 

Pushing his tongue against the floor of his mouth, he makes his way towards the Funny Bear Ice Cream truck. It’s step after step after step until he’s pulling the thin, metal back door open and barging inside, causing the two men to startle with wrapped, half-eaten hamburgers in their hands. 

The white-haired man tenses, the muscles on his biceps flex under a green shirt, and his ashy eyebrows slightly pinch, but other than that, he makes no move to stand from the stool he’s sitting at. The smaller guy is jumpier, but overall, Ed thinks they should be a lot more anxious about sitting in a truck filled with heavy narcotics in a fair that admits all age groups. 

But well, shit, he isn’t one to judge how others do business. 

“ _Fine_ ,” Ed spits in a second. The two men look at each other with a hint of combed-over amusement before blinking back at him. 

“You got any tramadol?” 

The scrawny bald man blurts an awfully high-pitched snicker.

“I’ll be damned,” the bigger one rasps with a slight shake of his head. “Martha wasn’t kidding when she said you’re no fun.” 

“Do you fucking have any or not.” Ed is overrun with the inexplicable urge to spit on the ground. Or rip his hair out. Or do both. He grinds his heel on the metal floor. 

The green-shirted man limits himself to a grunt before going in for another bite. The thin paper wrapping around his burger scrunches up with something like acute annoyance. Tiredness served with a side of ketchup, mustard, pickles and soggy bread. 

Less than a heartbeat after that, he gets up in a swift movement and squares his shoulders, head bowed to not bump against the truck’s ceiling. 

Ed hadn’t gauged just how huge he is.

“This look like a fucking pharmacy to you, kid?” he growls, working his teeth around the remainder of his last bite like a feral animal and the sight makes Ed’s fists curl around the lower hem of his shirt. Shit. _Shit_. 

He takes a few pointed steps in his direction before Ed can even think of getting a single word out and the world starts spinning as he instinctively retrocedes, but not fast enough for the man to not completely loom over him, like a cage of menacing arms and shoulders and a pair of eyes so piercing he’s sure there’s a big-ass hole where his abdomen should be right now. 

“Huh?” he grunts. Loudly. “I asked you something,” 

“N-no,” Ed scrapes, then shakes his head and tries to back even further, stopping himself at the reminder that he’s only got about two inches before he hits the wall behind. 

“I’m —” he tries, thinking only of his escape, his complete disappearance, trying not to choke on the prickling sense of danger that’s screaming his head off. “I just — I —”

The man gives him a single, perfunctory going over, crosses his arms in front of his chest — and breaks out in a thunderous laughter that shakes the entire vehicle through the force of it. 

Ed freezes over. 

“ _Jesus_ , kid,” he says in between rumbling chortles. “Look at you! It’s like you just seen a spirit.” He hears the other guy giggling around his meal in the background. “What’d you think I was gonna do, break that delicate little neck of yours? Send you over to meet your maker?” he says, shaking his head before smacking his arm.

Ed flinches, which makes him snort again. 

“At the very least…” he answers, trying to adjust his stance and shrugging himself a little straighter while his stomach recovers from that tingling contraction. Fuck. This is also the type of whiplash you don’t ever recover from. 

The guy backs off while wiping a tear away with his right knuckle. “Can you fucking believe this, Bido? This fucking shrimp here thinks I’m an actual thug,” 

Ed goes in for the kill at the remark — then thinks better of it, like a wooden puppet getting pulled in and out of himself by the taut string of hindsight. 

“Ah, the youth,” the man sighs in exaggerated ruefulness. 

Ed’s heart is beginning to hurt at the base of his throat. 

“S-so,” he clears his throat. Get it over with, get out. “Do y—”

“I told you already!” the man near-hollers at him, extending his arms. “Every single human emotion, we’ve got ‘em all.” Two hands fly over several ice cream containers within the horizontal freezer by their side. “Every color, every flavor. But listen, c’mere,” he says, curling a meaty finger in his direction. 

Ed complies despite himself and stands beside him over the open plastic tubs that read ‘Chocolate mint’; ‘Raspberry’; ‘Cookie Dough’. 

“What I’d recommend is suited for your needs, only ten times better,” he slides the freezer open to push a ‘Lemon Sorbet’ pint slightly to the right, revealing something all too surreal, even for his skewed perception. The man proceeds to take a small handle and pull a tiny drawer open, explaining why the freezer’s got a pretty thick backside by design and probably serving as a good pointer on how all of these people are clinically insane. 

“This,” says the man, carelessly extracting a clipped plastic baggie no bigger than the size of Ed’s palm, “is the future.” 

Ed leans in, arms still rigid by his sides. It’s some sort of power — which is simply great for specificity and not at all ominous, as he’s known from experience thus far. White. The bag is only about a third full. 

“Okay?” he deadpans after a second. The man’s eyes glimmer under the buzzing LED lights that hover over them, still holding the bag up to his nose’s height. 

“ _Okay?_ ” he scoffs, “Boy, this is worlds away from just okay, but I guess you’ll be lucky enough to figure it out for yourself. See, this here is called China White — named after it’s synthetic purity — these are about forty grams of the absolute smoothest, most successful painkillin’ paradise that money can buy. Tramadol has you eating up several times a day to get the same effect this beauty delivers within a single hit. It lasts longer, seeps deeper, and brings you down real slow. A nice and easy experience, all around. No real downer to this one — and I’m not just saying that as a strict salesman, here, am I, Bido?”

The skinny guy hums raggedly in response. 

“It’s the real deal,” he concludes as Ed leisurely chews the tension out on his inner cheek. 

There’s a reason he’s never tried anything more effective than his pharma tic tacs. It’s what he’s gotten used to, for one, and street confected drugs are a stupid option, especially in this area, where people like Nash Tringham run the county’s quality standards through shit that’s most likely mixed with rat posion. 

His molars have drawn blood and he tastes alloy. 

“D’you inhale it?” he asks. 

Bido screeches in the background. “Not unless your Halloween costume’s gonna be Mia Wallace with the Epi-Pen stuck between her tits.” 

That makes more sense than it should. It goes without saying that he already feels as though he’s in a wacky film, except as a background character, serving the purpose of showcasing a healthy dose of misery porn through zany humor and unlikely scenarios. 

He turns to the guy in front of him, who’s joining in the amusement with a quiet chuckle. “Nah, man, that’s the catch I guess. You don’t get the effects without a little discomfort,” he speaks while reaching down to slap the little drawer closed, “which is really just a question of efficiency, but shit. Nothin’s perfect in this world, though this one sure comes pretty close.” He flicks the baggie. 

“I don’t get it.”

The man turns to fully face him again, stretching the substance forward as he holds it between two fingers. “It’ll be 40 bucks for this — which is a friendly discount — , plus whatever a drug-store syringe is gonna cost you.” He huffs, “I don’t assume it’ll be a piggybank-breaking investment.”

Someone drops a tail piano on him. The pieces clatter all around as the white light above them flickers. 

Somehow, though, he walks out of it unscratched. 

When he looks again, he’s still standing straight and looking ahead at the offered powder. If there is a God, it long since left it clear how it doesn’t like to intervene in any of his mundane little qualms. No one does, truth be told. No one. 

He walks out on heavy steps, greeted by that same licorice-scented air that’s never gonna be the right temperature and holding a birthday cake flavored cone in his left hand. The one that came as a free bonus. 

He should’ve asked for sprinkles. 

He walks without direction, still feeling an immeasurable amount of energy pump his steps, fizzy, like he knows exactly where he’s going, like he’s got something important to solve within the hour, otherwise… 

He doesn’t remember Roy until their eyes meet again at the distance. 

Roy’s standing a few feet away from him, his figure framed by the green boomerang roller coaster that’s set up further away when he turns around, as if sensing his presence. There’s a lit cigarette dangling between his lips, he sucks a long, scorching drag in as they make eye contact from afar, leisurely blinking. 

Ed had no idea he liked smoking. 

Hell, maybe he doesn’t, not really. 

His eyes widen after a second, as if only then recognizing him. Ed feels the seconds drag by with that same strangeness with which he’s being looked at, like something foreign but not completely unfamiliar. Roy starts walking towards him and Ed feels like he’s looking at a movie, all slow motion and burst, saturated colors filling the air. He stands still and lets himself contemplate the scene. 

It’s freezing and it feels great. 

A cold drop of ice cream touches the back of his palm and he looks down at the cone with unveiled disgust — another thing that feels like it’s being dragged out — opting for letting it go. Thankfully there’s a black trash disposal not far from his side, otherwise he wouldn’t have thought twice about letting it just fall to the ground like an uncivilized asshole, barely resisting the urge to step on it right after, like an uncivilized asshole that’s also five years old. 

Fuck it, it’s not like anyone’s getting any medals for decent behavior at a time like this. There are dismembered synthetic eyeballs decorating the ground; vomit; a lost shoe; five-hundred-thousand cigarette butts; food; orphaned pennies. 

He throws it away and licks his hand clean in a swift motion, looking back at Mustang. Roy Mustang. A walking enigma. 

It occurs to him, then, that the problem has always been crystal clear. They’ve both been tip-toeing around the enormous gap of knowledge about the other’s life, haven’t they? Their true colors, or whatever it is you’re supposed to share with the person you give oral sex to. Or don’t. Then again, it may also be true that he’s got it all wrong. 

It’s all about sounding smart and looking un-approachable, handing out spectres of your true self, broadcasting the best version of all your filth and waiting to see what sticks to it. It’s all that feels like home to Ed, and Roy is honestly no better. Maybe that means everything’s water under the bridge, right? They can not talk, not touch each other, not remember anything about it, and then start all over again. They can not sweep things under the rug as opposed to just cover the entire floor with one. 

The realization hits him like a running wall, and fuck, he feels illuminated. 

*

He gets dropped off at the crack of dawn, right on the crack of a grimy sidewalk. Ed strolls away, careful not to step on any bugs while waving Roy and the rest of the group goodbye as he goes. 

One drain pipe and several broken bricks later, he’s sliding the window he purposefully left open the rest of the way up and stumbling into his chilled, empty bedroom. 

He hates how the carpet feels under his palm. It’s coarse enough to leave a pink imprint on the heel of his hand. 

Looking out the window, he realizes Roy doesn’t drive off until several moments after he’s disappeared into the house, which he guesses is the considerate, gentlemanly thing to do, and that’s alright with him. It’s alright. 

“So you two are getting serious, huh,” the voice assaults him from behind, but it’s hard to tell if he jumps out of surprise or just as a general effect of being alive at this exact moment, high off his non-existent pair of tits, with the residual moon rocks still running through his veins at a steady pace. 

He turns to see Luisa leaning against the door frame, half her face concealed behind the door. She’s got that look on her that makes it seem like she’s smiling, except she actually isn’t once you get a closer look. A scientific mystery. 

“No,” Ed answers, turning back to look out the window at a now-empty street. 

“I got the wrong impression, then?” It’s a sly remark, one he shouldn’t give into. He likes to think that he wouldn’t, were the situation not calling for it in neon letters, because if it isn’t her, he’ll just end up talking to one of the walls, he’ll have nothing to distract him from how badly he wants to climb up the roof with makeshift lightning rods. He’ll make and unmake his bed fifteen times straight — like the first time he took 40mgs of MFD instead of his usual 20. 

“It’s…” he starts. “It’s not a thing,”

“Hmm.”

“It isn’t.” _Plus it doesn’t work. My fault. I'll take the blame — well, 85% of the blame_ , he doesn’t add. 

He doesn’t turn to face her, either, not yet. Leave it to all future Ed to deal with whatever condescending or cryptic or downright spooky form of expression her face is broadcasting at the moment. 

The truth is he doesn’t know her all that well, Greg never talked too much about what she’s like. All he knows is they both got adopted when they were 10 and have equally dark eyes. 

Silence ensues. His hands clench around the window’s hinges which causes them to rattle a bit. 

“Why’s it any of your business, anyway — you gonna sell me out to earn yourself some house points?” Ed bites, hoping this surge of anxiety fueled super-strength isn’t gonna make him break anything. 

“My god,” Luisa gently scoffs. “You seriously think you’ve been the only one to get the Bible treatment? I could even say she’s gone soft on you, in comparison,” she informs him. 

And Ed has absolutely nothing to say to that. 

A beat passes. He hears the soft shuffling of feet behind him. 

“What passage did you get?” she quietly asks after a second.

Some birds have begun to flutter out of their precarious nests. 

“… Romans 12:17.” 

“Hmph, a classic.” Luisa answers. 

Fuck. 

This is them bonding over domestic shittyness, isn’t it? He guesses everyone’s gotta have something in common with what they call their friends, although this isn’t exactly that. People are so adamant about calling him Greg’s little brother, but he’s as related to him as he is to Evie, which is a thought that’s best just left alone. 

He hears her take a quick breath. “Anywho, in case my intel’s correct, I feel as though I gotta ask…” She trails off, sweet like sugar. Sugary words proper for all ominous intentions. It’s at this point that the following silence registers as what it actually is: a space for segue. For him to fill the silence and say ‘shoot’, except it’s not gonna happen. 

He does twist his neck a bit in order to catch a glimpse of her, resting his chin atop his left shoulder. 

She looks like she didn’t sleep, either. There’s her trademark winged eyeliner, purple eye-shadow that’s just the tiniest bit smudged towards a cheekbone. A heart-shaped choker, ripped fishnets, the whole shebang framed by undulated locks of rich dark hair. 

If he could choose to look like anyone in the world, he realizes, it’d be just like Luisa Hartmans. Right at the edge of seventeen, nothing but a few feeble months stand between her and being officially kicked out of Dante’s for being a legal adult. Same goes for her twin brother, except he’ll be meeting an official state prison instead of his independence.

“You a virgin, Ed?” she asks.

The scoff is knee-jerk automatic, but it doesn’t mean he actually registers the full meaning of that question. 

“Why,” he starts, a sleazy mimicry of her own elegant wording. “I didn’t know you cared so much, _Luisa_ ,” 

She gives herself the time and space to take a prolonged sigh. “I guess I don’t…” she answers, arms leisurely crossed in front of her stomach. “It’s just… Well, it’s just something that might matter if you go out with Roy Mustang.”

Same old story. Same old story. ‘Shake your head’. He shakes his head. ‘Roll your eyes’. It goes with a pointed eye roll. “Okay?”

A car screeches in the distance. The house creaks with the same tiredness it always carries like deadweight on it’s foundations as Luisa lets a tiny fathom of a smile play around her features, blinking at him in a way that by all means should be considered patronizing yet… Doesn’t quite feel that way. It’s just plain weird that they’re having this conversation at all. 

“You know,” she starts on a rueful breath. “People have always said I have a sex problem — back at the home we grew up in, they labeled me deviant since I was about eight for asking too many questions during our anatomy lessons. An eight-year-old girl, can you fucking believe? They were so Christian,” she chuckles, “they had me go to bed wearing mittens so I didn’t get to act out any devilish urges. Dante’s also had her go at me for dressing like a ‘two-dime roadway whore’ — and it goes without saying that no one’s ever said anything about my idiot brother in that sense, even if he has proven himself to be ten times worse.” She speaks while padding closer to the other side of his room’s threshold, sliding against the wall as her eyes glaze over the memory. “Anyway.” She sighs. “All I’ve ever done is fuck a fair amount and not pretend I don’t enjoy it. I remember when I started sleeping with him — Mustang, I mean. He was very good — and nice, too. Perhaps a little too much stamina, but I wasn’t complaining at the time.” 

Ed somehow didn’t expect she’d be as candid, as transparent. Before he knows it, he’s turned the whole way and finds himself leaning back against the window with his undivided attention pinned on her, on the way her lips move with ease around her phrasing. 

“Maybe a little old-fashioned, you know?” she considers, eyes fixed on Ed’s messy desk on the other side of the room. “He insisted on giving me a ride back but wanted me to stay the night, or offered, anyway. He actually made small talk for way longer than what he strictly had to… I don’t know, none of that is the point.” Ed swallows. 

“The thing is, he — well I remember thinking, while we were at it, and then after, when he stood to flush the condom out before asking if I wanted to go again… I thought, this is what a truly sex-obsessed person looks like, isn’t it?” 

Maybe he could pretend he didn’t see it coming, he could feign complete ignorance on everything he’s heard being said about Roy, ever since he’s known his name. Roy Mustang fucks like a God; Roy Mustang lost his virginity to an older woman when he was thirteen; Roy Mustang has seen practically every girl and boy in his grade naked. He lets his eyes fall closed and hums. 

“Yeah,” she answers. He opens his eyes to see her trailing her bony fingers over the side of her neck. A gesture of uncertainty, as if she shouldn’t have said what she just did. 

Maybe it was wrong of her, no matter how genuine her intentions — which he doesn’t really know shit about. He also doesn’t believe in the concept of destiny enough to think that any of this is happening for a reason, that he’s getting some sort of beneficial information passed on for later use.

If anything, this has been an unexpected amount of exposure on her part, and maybe just a little too much about the obligated sexual dimension of being alive and more than a month away from turning sixteen. He fucking hates it. 

Ed shrugs. “Guess I’ll die, then.” 

“You don’t have to, though,” she immediately answers. “It’s like I said, he’s really nice —”

“I know,” 

“But you _should_ be aware of how much he likes it —”

“I know,”

“Well — I mean, do _you_ like it?” she inquiries, and when the hell did she get this close? 

“Like what,” he hisses, hunching in on himself but not because he really means to. His shoulders are still slightly shaking like the cold seeped into his bones, freezing them over. His muscles are going to give him hell in a couple of hours.

“I dunno.” She gives him a tilted look, roaming her eyes around his frame before shrugging. “Oral? Penetration?” His molars are gonna crack.

He feels Mustang’s warm fingers trailing through his body at the same pace at which bile ascends up his throat.

“Jacking off?” She chuckles. 

He looks at a stain on the ground, but sees her frame lean in a bit further out of the corner of his eye when he pointedly doesn’t answer. 

“Oh…” She says. “You’ve never — you never have, have you?” There’s no judgment in her tone per se, but at this point, it doesn’t matter what the hell she’s grilling him for — the point has been made, underlined, sprinkled with shining glitter. 

He’ll be too embarrassed to even get out of bed once the molly in him has completely died down. And there ain’t jack shit he can say about not having had enough time to even think of it… Masturbation… Because the thought _has_ popped into his mind a couple of times. Obviously. That’s basically how he figured he didn’t feel attracted to the opposite sex, but it never landed on any concrete action. It felt nothing like an actual urge and everything like lukewarm repealment. Unease, like he was back at the clinic getting sponge baths with cooling water delivered by unfeeling hands that, at times, scrubbed a little too hard in all the wrong places. 

He never reflected on the fact that that could become an issue, now that he thinks of it. Now that the subject has irremediably been brought up and it feels like it’s repeatedly kicking his stomach in with its inevitability. 

Luisa takes a shallow breath in. “Well…Like, I mean… Maybe you should.” Luisa’s probably looking at him like Mr. Hughes sometimes does — with these doe eyes of mercy, so annoyingly wide they can fit entire oceans of all types of commiseration in them. It’s disgusting.

He lets his hands fall to his sides and walks over to the edge of his bed. “Yeah, whatever.”

He wants to ask her if she shouldn’t be worrying about herself at the moment, about what’ll become of all the plans and promises she and Greg had at some point made to each other since they became orphaned, over reheated meals and borrowed clothes and prospects filled with fantasy. Does she feel betrayed by him? Is she angry at him, or at all those shining storefronts selling nightlife, rich elixirs of rebellion, and drug-fueled energy that he immediately chose over just gritting his teeth and taking Dante’s bullshit, like she did for him? 

There’s thankfully still a tiny sliver of decency in Ed, and so he keeps his mouth shut. He’ll live with the likelihood of never truly knowing any of it, and they’ll all eventually outgrow this fucking house and go their separate ways. He’ll remember all about the dark-haired girl who once came into his room and talked about sex in a way that made him want to piss himself in embarrassment and hide from the world, pretending he could wear all his clothes even into the goddamn shower if he wanted. Forever.

“Oh, I almost forgot,” she suddenly says, shuffling out of his view. “This came in the mail for you.” 

“Mail?” 

“Yeah, call me risky but I’d rather use the front door than risk getting tetanus from climbing up the outside.”

Hm, tetanus. There’s some food for thought, is he even vaccinated for that? He knows he was delivered to this house along with all necessary documentation, like a pedigree dog with it’s medical record stapled to it’s collar and statement that renders it legally disabled — with the extra cash from the state that that entails. He should probably double check, though. 

“It’s from upstate,” she informs him as he reaches out for the crisp white rectangle and looks at the returning address. 

Something in him immediately snaps when he recognizes it. 

“You got any family over there?” she asks, but he’s busy tearing the envelope to shreds in a split second, taking out the single cardboard paper that lays inside and feeling it’s colors twist his stomach. 

His breath nearly catches. 

The ridiculously early christmas greeting shows the three of them. Mr. Jerso, Mr. Zampano, Alphonse Elric beside them both with Jerso’s arm around his shoulders. 

Al. 

They’re wearing horrid christmas sweaters, probably listening to that _Wham!_ song already because they’re all giant saps and grinning way too hard. Al’s holding up a grey cat with a white belly that looks like it’d rather be out back, digging a hole in which to nap until the age of men was over, but is humoring them by staying still with a tiny Santa Claus hat on its little head. 

A snort escapes him. 

He turns the postcard and it’s got three different types of handwriting on it, crammed into the edges to fit their message. 

_Dear Ed_ , the first one reads, _I’ll be leaving in a week for a two-month research stay at the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos with some of my partners in Peru, which is why we went through the wintery motions this early. Long, fancy name, I know. It’s nothing like the protestant austerity we’re used to in the States, but I’ll gladly snuggle back a few endemic flora samples for you to see when you visit us next year. Even if I won’t see you this time around, I hope you’re doing great and send a crushing hug your way. Much love, -J_

 _Ed,_ he goes on to the next one, _two things: first one is I order you to ignore Jerso’s promise of becoming an international criminal specialized in biological hazards because he will most definitely not be doing that thing he said — lest he’d like to go through me, first. Just in case, hide this postcard so that it can’t be used as evidence. Second thing, is you have been officially appointed as the judge who’s gotta determine what this new furry addition to the family will be named. Alphonse and everyone else here will think of you every time we call her, so no pressure! Love -Z_

_Ed,_

He swallows when Al’s distinct cursive comes up. 

_I miss you so much I’ve actually hallucinated we can communicate telepathically._

He swallows down a bark of laughter that'd certainly turn into a sob in three seconds. 

_Ask either of the dads and they’ll tell you it was an event involving cough syrup two weeks ago, but the truth is I’ve never stopped thinking about that Elric telepathic channel you raged on about when we were like five, so congrats, you’ve finally driven me insane. Either way, you’re much more articulate when I have made up, fever-induced conversations with you and definitely don’t drop that many f-bombs. You also speak a little Italian, which is great, but even with all that, Imaginary Ed has got nothing on you. Not a single thing. Bilingual people are overrated, anyway._

_I’m counting down the days until we finally see each other again. It won’t be long now. I love you._

He doesn’t know how many times he re-reads it or how long he’s been sitting on his creaky mattress until Luisa speaks again. 

“That the family that rejected you?” she says, and man. What a stinger when it’s put like that. 

“What?” he croaks back, perhaps still a little too distracted to feel too terrible. 

“It’s just,” she blinks, a little stunned herself. “Evie said —” But she snorts, immediately faltering. “Forget it, I don’t know why I would take her word for anything. I’m sorry,”

“‘s fine,” he mumbles, taking his gaze back down, focusing on the sprawled letters in black and blue ink. 

“It’s really not,” she answers. 

“It’s just my brother,” he says back, still staring at the promise between his hands. Suddenly he doesn’t mind thinking about how early department stores start bringing out the plastic snowmans. 

“Younger or older?” she asks. 

“Younger.” He can’t tear his damn eyes away. Luisa hums as he turns the postcard over to the main picture again, drilling into each of their eyes, their dimples, their stupid happy faces and that stupidly nice and cozy living room in the background. 

“It’s… This is him,” he turns it to her with his pointer directed at Al — in all his light ash-blonde, graciously-side-swept glory; his bright-eyed, warm-smiling eminence; his defining jawbone — for some insufferably obscure reason he can’t quite understand. 

But he does. He shows him to her. And she looks at the whole postcard. And she doesn’t laugh. She doesn’t blow a raspberry at him or say something mean about it, like she well could. 

Instead, she smiles — a faint, fleeting thing of a smile. The only one abandoned kids are capable of mustering, really, but it doesn’t mean any less. 

“Hm, he’s pretty cute,” she concedes after a second, something in her eyes going liquid soft. “How old?”

“Fourteen,” 

“So how come you’re not with him? If I may ask,” 

Evie’s always fucked with him over the correspondence he gets from them. The only thing that keeps some people afloat is reveling in other people’s misfortune, and he knows everything that leaves her mouth is poisonous, radioactive, steaming bullshit — but still. Still. It reaches a very specific cord in his heart and tugs at it so violently he’s rendered incapable of breathing until he digs through all the old letters to remind himself that they mean every word and that it wasn’t any of their faults — that shit does, in fact, sometimes happen. 

Ed shrugs while finally moving to tuck the picture back into its envelope. He folds the seal flap back down in the hopes of clamping his own turmoil shut, too. 

“Paperwork,” he finally says, and he leaves it at that.

“You know any cool cat names?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> :)


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hello, happy 202000101021 welcome back! I hope you had a great holiday and are feeling well atm. recent times have been a little like life grabbed me by the ankle and jerked me upside down for hours on end, I just moved places for like the third time within the span of eight dumb months and pretty much everything feels unfamiliar right now except for this wretched fic right here, so please, know how much I appreciate all of you reading :) In spite of it all, I managed to get a ton of writing done and am nearly finished w chapter 13! (Although I'll probably go through it seven consecutive times before determining that it's okay enough to beta — at which point my brain will say sike and make me redact it all because I ardently hate myself) I do hope to deliver soon enough. ALSO, you will have noticed that an official end is finally within sight at 18 total chapters so yes I have formally gotten my shit together and wrapped this thing up in a timeline (there is a timeline). 
> 
> In other equally important news, I want to seriously thank you (yes again) for all the cool comments and general feedback, it's been really rather great to get to know what your thoughts and impressions about this trainwreck are, and I do read all of 'em, always, with a huge stupid smile on my face. Sorry that I don't always get the chance to respond to all of them but it's probably for the best bc man sometimes I do not know how to Language and answer/edit like five times over but I appreciate it so much! It's super gratifying to know my writing can do something for ya. 
> 
> I'll shut up now but even if you lurk you've been the highlight to my 2020 so THANK YOU and I am SORRY about this chapter's semi cliffhanger. 
> 
> cw: drUgS, all colors and flavors; all shapes and sizes. Roy being a dumbass; Ed being a dumbass with one or two serious issues. Needles. Vomiting.

11:55 am. 

He expected it to be bad. But never quite like this. 

Sure, the initial drought could very well be expected as the natural consequence of getting absolutely fucking pissed for hours on end while riding a tea-cup spinner and getting lost in a mirror maze. Sure, but the sledge-hammer driving a nail into the back of his left eye-socket, he could do without. 

The oppressive wasps currently crushing his skull are a bit overkill. 

The trembling weight bolted to his bones is dragging him down a little too exaggeratedly. Constricting his lungs like it’s holding a grudge.

A preliminary assessment of the situation might reveal that the main problem is simple enough; he’s known about all of these plummeting after-effects in simple theory and nothing more. Actually feeling his system drain itself from all known forms of dopamine and serotonin and endorphin and functioning-brain-juice-in dropping into the sub-zero area of emotional states through hours of physical anguish and an exhaustion of a brand he never thought he’d have the pleasure of meeting, is a different matter through and through. 

He’s made it to sixth period by the time he’s reached this conclusion, jotting his computations down on the margins of his notebook with nothing but estimates about the dose he _thinks_ he ingested Saturday night, in addition to a proportionally inverse calculation about the hours it lasted in relation to the time it’s gonna take for his brain’s neurotransmitters to snap back into action.

Anytime now. 

Ed is fucking ready to stop feeling like the living dead. Yes, sir. Please, Mister Lord of Hell and Circumstance Sir. 

The sporadic pain shooting up his arm and leg isn’t even his primary concern, which is — hah — _concerning_. 

He looks ahead at the screeching whiteboard that makes a scandal out of reflecting the dull light pouring down from an overcast sky. It’s been a breezy day bearing no signs of Mustang. 

No matter how dire the situation is, though, it’s the sixth period and he’s made it so far. 

He’s grateful for having taken a seat three entire rows back from his usual place, apart from the extra layers of clothing he’s procured for himself today. He’s a very practical individual when he feels like microwaved shit.

His left thumb is absentmindedly chipping some of the yellow skin off his #2 pencil as he looms over a completed calculus pop-quiz, because that much he can do. Than much he can always do. He hasn’t seen Roy anywhere and Ed’s honestly been too scared to initiate any text conversations. Any calls. Any unwarranted signs of life. 

He’s absent and it shouldn’t matter, but for some reason it weighs on him like a ball and chain secured to the back of his mind. Roy probably just feels as shitty as he does, right? He decided to skip a day, because the ultimate conclusion to all of this crap is that there categorically isn’t a single drug in the world of stimulants worse than molly. 

Ed can’t believe he didn’t think of the downfall — he can’t believe how little he thought, in general, about anything and everything and whatever and whenever. This is definitely what divine punishment feels like: having to stay alive.

He’d like to take the extra time he’s bought himself by finishing so quickly to lay his head on folded arms atop his desk and drift for a while, however brief it might be, but there’s also the question of poise and dignity. Plus, if he closes his eyes for longer than three seconds, his brain will certainly spin off of its own axis and then — _then_ he’ll land himself in the laughing place for sure. 

So he decides to get up and turn the test in. The tendons at the back of his knee scream along with the rest of both his legs — yes, both, even the one that didn’t get touched by fire and has lived a life of unblemished privilege, the massive shit. They wobble like badly cooked spaghetti and he feels the tremble hijack his entire body as he turns to the side and places both palms on the desk’s surface to push himself up.

The last thing he says before the lights go out, naturally, is, “Fuck.” 

*

She gets up, she says something he can’t make out, smiles despite herself. 

Turning back to the white undershirt that dances around crisp air and filters sunlight with elegant ease, she mutters something under her breath — something like what she usually says, in that subtle tenor that lets him know he’s off the hook even before she’s even uttered a single phrase. 

A breath as fresh as the fields, fields as endless as his own palm when he stretches it out in front of him to cover the entire countryside. 

He’s too good at making her laugh, at hiding from Al for hours on end, at cupping fat toads and cold mud between his fingers like nothing could escape his grasp. Like his hands are so objectively small, they’re actually essential. 

“Mom,” he says, but she doesn’t turn to him, so he tries again, honing the inflection in this strange voice of his that says, “Mom.” 

Brown hair. Chocolate cake brown. Wooden-branches-in-the-wind-brown. “Hm?” she asks. 

“Look at this.” 

Perhaps it’s too much stamina, the residual puff of life that’s ready to propel itself out of his fragmented body for good — but he runs like you shouldn’t be able to when it comes to dreams. 

He runs like it’s actually happening, and when a run-down concrete wall appears in front of him, he whips up the imagination needed to see all the oddly arranged drain tubes that’ll help him climb up. 

Of course he makes it, but the window that greets him is decidedly shut.

If he can peek inside for long enough without blinking — this he simply knows — he’ll be able to watch himself sleep on a white bed with baby-duck patterned sheets. 

He can feel their papery texture from here, because all of this has already happened. 

He sees the tubes attached to him, he feels the one poking into his basilic vein. Left arm. 

A block of understanding falls into him as he takes the rest of his surroundings in. 

This is Dante’s house. 

This is his room, apparently. 

He keeps looking even if it suddenly becomes too uncomfortable to put into words. It’s like he’s peeking into an R-rated movie no kid should be seeing, the window frames it’s screen like a splintery, wooden cage and Ed sees himself sleep and sleep and sleep, because vegetables aren’t good for much else. The oxygen bag inflates periodically.

He hears the door to his room rattle with prickling intensity and snaps his gaze over to where the knob shakes in anger. He sort of knows what happens next, because there could be virtually anyone on the other side, but he resolutely doesn’t want to know who. 

He doesn’t want to become the person in that bed, go through it all over again when his current skin is still smooth and virtually untouched. Still he knows it’s yet to come. 

The door bursts open, before he can yell in warning a piece of concrete gives under his foot and he falls back, knowing you don’t survive a fall from this height, knowing his mom is no longer watching. 

_Down_ — 

He wakes with a hell of a start. 

Heavy panting takes him through the next few breaths of air as reality fits itself into the first fragments of wakefulness. 

He focuses on the white square foldscapes that comprise the ceiling’s pattern as a ghost of a tension headache makes an appearance around his temples, like surrounding them in a vice grip. 

Back on schedule, then — except his boots are gone. 

The sweater he thought he was wearing, too, unless he’s halluciated everything from fucking dusk and just woke up from an hour-long coma.

He turns his head to the side, hoping it won’t fall off by the sheer force of a sudden, twirling gravity, smacking his lips and bringing the heel of his hand against his eye socket. 

There’s a thin mattress holding his weight, bright sunlight pouring in from a terribly familiar row of windows.

“Shit,” he mumbles, part of him still grateful he at least didn’t break his neck by falling off the side of the house in his dream. 

“I’ll say,” a voice snaps him into full wakefulness and he sort of drags his prickling eyeballs up to where a thin woman materializes out from a blob of color. A nurse. Casual scrubs and a knitted purple cardigan. The image of mercy, he assumes. 

“Did you happen to run a marathon without telling anyone and then proceed to not have a single drop of water for the next three days?” She asks. He knows it's probably meant to be rhetorical — whatever the fuck it is she’s saying while throwing him this amused little smile over her shoulder.

“What?” he croaks. 

There’s some faint sniffling coming from her own direction. She’s busy ripping a patch of gauze from its wrapper, crumpling the piece of paper and tossing it into the bin by her side. 

The nurse looks back to him and is close enough for Ed to see she’s wearing a dark shade of lipstick, her lips are pursed tight under a defined cupid’s bow. 

He looks down, sluggish and already starting to feel that familiar dread of annoyance that usually comes with the fact that one is _awake_ , but as soon as his sight meets the thin transparent tube stuck to his left arm with a line of adhesive tape he turns his head away, ripping it far off the mark from where the needle’s entering his skin. 

Not that he really feels it. It’s just a strange sight, is all. 

“That’s just a little hydrating serum, I’ll take it off in a few minutes,” she casually informs him, keeping her attention pinned on what seems to be the most miserable sixth grader to have ever stepped foot in this infirmary. Both his knees and elbows are scraped to hell and there are just enough paper towels surrounding his dangling legs to make an educated guess and assume part of his skin was literally flayed off while playing kickball or some shit. Medieval style. He doesn’t look older than twelve. 

“Is this even legal,” he asks, slightly jerking his injected arm. 

An ordaining whistle goes off in the distance and he hears a lot of nondescript yelling and laughing and sports-related swearing. Sometimes he forgets just how many students there are at this school — he forgets the fact that it’s the only one in so many miles and comprises all levels of education excluding kindergarten. 

The purple-lipped nurse snickers at him without meeting his eyes. “Unless we’re talking contraceptives, STD tests, blood-work, or pregnancy tests, student consent is implicit in any medical procedures,” she recites, finally turning on her heel after ruffling the crying kid’s hair.

“It’s all in the forms signed by your guardian, if you wanna to go over it.” The laugh in her voice is audible even if she doesn’t go through the trouble of fully intoning it and holy shit. Can people give him a full five fucking minutes of being awake before leaning into the whole patronizing adult routine? He’d be livid were he not saving up enough energy to not pass out a second time.

“What time is it,” he asks. She moves close enough to the bedside that he can smell the flowery perfume coming off of her in gentle waves and lightly flicks her wrist in order to adjust the brown leather strap of her wristwatch. 

“Six minutes ‘till noon.” Ed runs his block-of-sand tongue over his lips as he tentatively sits up. Everything’s navy blue carpets, mineral white ceilings, and artificial wood around here. The infirmary never smells as bad as it probably could and the kid’s gentle crying isn’t really annoying. Still, he’d like to be excused as soon as possible. 

“Great,” he manages. “I can still make it to biochem.”

The nurse manages a wider smile at that. “And you reckon that’s a good idea?”

A beat passes. 

“Um, yeah?”

“Well, I beg to disagree,” she answers with a tilted head, hovering around to the plastic bag that hangs over him like a see-saw. 

Ed would beg to disagree _to disagree_ , but he isn’t in the mood for begging, so he curls both hands (uncovered) into fists at his sides and blinks at her. 

“You can go home if you like, but if you’re staying it’ll be right here, with me and a few packs of saltines.” She beams like no one’s broken the news to her: she has the absolute worst job ever. 

He’s still looking at her carefully painted mouth when a faint pinch makes him jerk back. It happens so fast he barely has time to react before she speaks again. 

“There,” she clips in a smoothing tone, showing him the free needle and pressing some cotton to the freshly released vein. He certainly hopes this IV isn’t recycled or some shit. 

He hears someone cursing in the distance and his gaze is instantly pulled in that direction, towards the window right behind that’s spilling afternoon sunlight on his back through swept curtains, like melancholia in a painting or some shit.

He scans the field. Something about the tone reminded Ed of him, but it’s gone in an instant when he tells himself, logically, that Roy hasn’t been to any of their mutual classes. Unless, of course, he decided to only show up for practice. It’s not an impossible prospect. The guy really seems to like outdoor recreation as a means of posturing. 

Ed keeps looking, draping his gaze over the horizon, scrutinizing every single patch of marked grass. 

The field encompasses a sea of dudes in grey t-shirts, nearly black with sweat at this point, making their rounds like stalking animals, pissing on their perimeter to assert dominance and giving each other shit over nothing. Ed wants to roll his eyes, but the thumping discomfort on his skull reminds him not to. 

Either way, none of them seem to be Roy. 

They don’t move the same, because there’s a very distinct manner in which he strolls and trots and stretches, all of it accentuated with a type of ease that makes it look like he’s perpetually bored. Maybe not even bored, necessarily, just… Tired. Tired just like Ed feels, but with actual flair. Sophistication. Style, vouge, whatever the fuck. 

Roy sighs periodically at nothing in particular, like the wind constantly tells him awful secrets. The weight of his arm when it’s draped along Ed’s shoulders feels grounding but he knows it has more to do with the way Roy himself leans into him, sometimes, like he’d be happy to just be carried places and let himself drift in whichever direction Ed wants to take. 

Yet there’s always a technique to it. 

Even shit-faced it’s all he broadcasts, and none of the moving figures he sees under the sun even come close to resembling it. 

*

2:57 pm. 

He ties his boots with haste and snatches his jacket from out of Nurse Priscilla’s (her actual name) steady hands after hours of playing trivia on his phone and waiting for enough time to pass by. 

Intermittently biting his nails and feeling his chest clench every time something close to Roy’s baritone hitched in the background. 

So here he is, three bottles of water and about a liter of Sunny-D later, hurrying down the concrete stairs at the main entrance.

He’s so fucking lucky they don’t do random urine drug tests at the slightest provocation anymore — he vividly remembers last year’s Seniors lining up outside the health station with death written all over their faces, whispering to each other about those rumors they’d heard, that nerdy theatre kid really selling his piss? How much gatorade do you have to chug for weed to leave your system? — but he didn’t manage to avoid a lecture about dehydration and the 8-hours-of-sleep-dogma. 

Winry’s voice pops up from behind. 

“Yo, dumbass!” She purposely bumps into him. “Way to ignore me for three days straight, I’m all for your love-birding but damn, like I would’ve settled if you just sent me a smoke signal or a poop-emoji or some — woah, hey.” Her hand flies upon his shoulder, a feather-light hold like he wouldn’t dare slip from her touch, even if she were keeping him up with just a finger. She knows him too well, but it goes without saying. “Are you alright?” 

“Don’t touch me, I’m so low on electrolytes I might steal yours from mere exposure,”

She snorts. “Are you living off of your smartass-energy reserves right now?”

He gives her a sloppy wink in return. He feels the fulfilling prophecy of the flu that’ll finish settling on his bones by the time he makes it to the bookstore. 

Winry rolls her eyes as they fall into a steady, parallel pace — something so prone to happening that at first he was truly inclined to think it weird. But tetris blocks only fall in one direction, and that’s as much a truth as the unspoken synergy that crackles between them every time they meet. It’s been this way almost since the beginning. 

She usually goes faster, not just in terms of walking. Living, breathing, smiling. Solving problems before they can even be interpreted as such. All her cuts heal so quickly you haven’t even given any proper condolences before she’s already picking at the scab, eyes set over the horizon while she taps a foot in anticipation for the sun to hide — to make room for a new, fresh day to come around a few hours later and give her another chance. 

And yet she waits for him. He who clings on to every little thing like it’ll bolt without a second’s notice, he who walks like dragging a block of cement but refuses to stop and sit down for a minute, as she’s suggested plenty — on both the practical and metaphorical senses. 

Patience isn’t one of those virtues you’d normally attribute to people who shine so hard and live so bright. Neither, he thinks, is tenderness. 

But she waits a bit and, in turn, he hurries a tad. Suddenly they’re stuck to each other and it feels too natural. 

“Gotta keep it going, otherwise I’ll drop dead on the sidewalk,” he continues. 

“I’ll carry you home, bridal style,” she offers, and Ed scoffs without really thinking about the obvious result of Winry’s full-fledged offense. 

“What,” she deadpans. “You don’t think I could manage your scrawny ass?” 

“No comment.”

“I could run a 5k marathon with you thrown over my shoulder.”

“No official statements can be issued at this time.”

“Bitch,” she elbows him again, he smiles, she huffs back. “What are you doing right now? Work?” He nods. “But isn’t that like in an hour or so?” He nods again. “What do you do to fill that time? I know it ain’t getting a nutritious meal,” she chuckles. 

“You know jack about my life,” he says in feigned indignation, adjusting his bag’s strap on his shoulder. 

“Yeah, well, I’m gonna go get my helix pierced, wanna come with?” 

Ed turns to her. “Your helix _is_ pierced — on — on both ears, right?” He pauses as she rummages her back-pocket for the car keys. 

“Right?” Catching a glimpse of her left side is a bit of a challenge when she’s pointedly looking ahead at the parking lot’s direction, but he still tilts his head in a feeble attempt of proving he didn’t actually hallucinate the shiny black earrings she was wearing on there last week. 

“Yep, I’ve got three on my left side and two on this one, see?” She curls her poiner to tuck some golden strands of hair behind her ear. “So do the math, genius, one’s missing.” 

“Oh,” he barely gets out before the distinct pitch of Breda’s laughter invades his senses. Hopefully the way his right hand twitches has nothing to do with it, but he’s also running out of time to waste on school grounds, at least for today, which will hopefully be over soon enough.

“Yeah, okay,” he nearly whispers at Winry while getting a move on towards where he thinks she’s parked. “Okay. I’m down.” 

“Cool,” she smiles. 

He can’t resist the urge to look over his shoulder as they both walk away, his eyes immediately landing on the small group of people gathered around the base of the stairs. Pinpoint accuracy. He sees the usual clothing, laughter, banter and sparking cigarettes, but no Mustang. He scans the scene a little further, taking in as much detail as he possibly can without tripping on rubble or getting caught looking. They could be laughing at the memory of all the embarrassing stuff he got down to last time they saw each other. He wouldn’t blame them for it. 

A few seconds more and it becomes obvious that Roy isn’t among them, there’s no dark hair or lustered gaze to be caught around the cluster of people swarming around the exit bell with relief. He wishes he could feel some of it, too, but the anxious grip on his chest hasn’t stopped making itself known. Ed begins to wonder how much of it really has to do with being hungover, not that the other symptoms have faltered, but the way the back of his neck prickles in high alert, begging for him to turn around at least one last time is pretty telling. 

He hates himself most when he can’t rationalize with his gut, no matter how hard he tries drilling reason into himself, excavating the sickening pit of distress that gnaws at him like cancer. There’s just nothing he can do.

It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t. He wouldn’t have known what to do if Roy had been there, anyway. 

There would’ve been a reason why he didn’t look for him and he would’ve done right to steer clear. The fact that they haven’t spoken is an obvious enough signal. Roy doesn’t want to. 

That’s fine. It’s actually more than fine, it’s dandy. The other night was a total shitshow, he’d wanna distance himself from any and all reminders of it, too. At least for a while after it’s happened. 

He spent enough time staring at the empty typing box destined towards his contact and couldn’t for the life of him find any words to transform into a text bubble. Whatever did come to him as a pang of divine inspiration was instantly shut down and deleted. Backtracked. Wiped. 

Winry unlocks her car and they drive away, all the while he keeps his eyes stuck to the floor between his dusty boots. 

*

“You’re gonna love this guy, Mr. Garfiel’s done all my rooks _and_ never snitched on me for being under sixteen,” Winry tells him as they round the little park that should then merge them into what Ed guesses could be the town’s main avenue, if only because it’s the only geographical stretch that’s got more than two consecutive drug stores within five-or-so blocks, and said establishments have those light bulbs railings that go off like a snake line. That’s considered cosmopolitan. 

“I just gotta be back in an hour,” he reminds her, to which she bats a hand in his direction. 

“Yeah, yeah,” she chuckles. “Just how damn long do you think it even takes to pierce an ear?” Ed falls back into the seating with a vague enough huff, not an outright admission of guilt over not knowing shit about how shit works. 

He then looks at the wrong moment — or perhaps the right one — or perhaps the only one there ever is within the fallout of events. The point is he turns his head sideways as they approach a stop sign that’s got something that looks a lot like a bullet hole and a few scratched up stickers plastered on it. 

He doesn’t know if his silence is at all telling, if Winry cares to glance sideways herself anytime she passes through this same spot. 

He looks at the bench he was sitting on when they first met, all those years ago — which only constitutes a couple of them, really, but with the way the event seems both monumentally distant and incredibly close, Ed doesn’t know just how objective his telling of time oughta be. 

He was thirteen. 

He was wearing a mustard-yellow shirt which was really the worst part of it. What a fucking color to be wearing on a day like that. 

It hadn’t even been a full month, but Georgie was still living at Dante’s back then and it didn’t take two full dinners together for Ed to figure he was living with clinically unhinged people. Greg and Luisa endlessly bickered at each other; Greg pulled Luisa’s hair all the time, she harshly flicked his face in retaliation — he called her a bitch and she called him a meth head, something Ed couldn’t really make sense of at the time. 

Evie threatened to stab George’s belly with a barbecue fork if he didn’t stop chewing like a cow. She went as far as to get her knees on the table and crawl all the way towards his end in order to grab the remaining mashed potatoes on his plate and forcibly smack them on his face, leaving a trail of broken glasses, tossed food and spilt Fanta on the wake of her wreckage as Dante near screeched herself to death.

Ed had seen some shit back at the home, sure, but he still wondered when the nervous clutching his stomach did whenever stuff like this went down was supposed to stop happening. It was fucked enough to actually _be_ a child, why on earth did he have to have the processing capabilities of one, too? 

All in all, he knew it was all a matter of time — a matter of his time to come around. A matter of time for Evie to set her hungry eyes on something new. A matter of time for him to truly join the family. So it happened Friday, when most kids were out driving themselves crazy at the park just a few blocks away from the house, the house he now had the commitment to call his own, playing dodgeball; hide and seek; foursquare. A lot of dynamics he didn’t know the rules of. 

He ran out of the house for the first time ever, holding the upper hem of his shirt against his bleeding nose, clenching his hand around the fabric as more and more fluid stained the entire front at a steady pace. It quickly cooled as it left his body, but his entire face felt warmed by it, which was a welcome enough sensation with how the wind began to blow after five. 

He arrived upon a bench, then. This bench he sees now, with the added commentary of some graffities it didn’t have back then. Not that he had taken too much notice when half the things in this new place seemed to be in a rapid state of decay. 

He sat. He looked at the sky and stared at how the branches over him swayed in the wind. He waited. 

A couple of hurried steps crushed some dried leaves behind his back, but the sound had already rounded him by the time he’d even thought of turning. Lo and behold, Winry Rockbell appeared in sight. Not that he knew her name, she was just one of those other kids whose hand shot up a _lot_ during assembly, to whom teachers always granted a word, who wore pink and white and pastel blue, who wore her hair in a neat ponytail with nicely textured scrunchies and whose eyes twinkled under any form of light. 

Ed had decided pretty early on that he was meant to stay away. To look at the ground at all times. To mind his own business and hope people would simply leave it instead of poking at it with a stick, as kids usually do. 

“Hey, you!” she said at the tail-end of an excited breath, her hair mildly disheveled and cheeks pink with exertion. “We’re a player short for kickball, are y— Oh.” She stopped upon looking at him — _really_ looking. Her marbled eyes went wide with shock, then swiftly melted into something akin to worry, but not quite, Ed decided. 

He strained along the looming certainty of her laughter. She was going to at least gawk at him in mild disgust within a few seconds — she just was. 

Ed aimlessly let go of his ruined T-Shirt in favor of using the back of his hand to wipe the remaining stains around his face, sniffing all the dribbling blood back into his nose, looking away at some discarded plastic cookie wrappers that someone had tossed on the street ahead, at how they mingled with the flowers that’d grown at the base of an old tree. 

This much he knew. After the accident and growing up around so many squinting eyes, he was very well trained in the art of making himself less disgusting to the common glare. The one he wanted to scream at every single time it waltzed into his ailing, constricted little box of a space and _stared_ — downright; point-blank. Blunt. 

He never did utter a single word that wasn’t sorry or please or thank you, thank you for not dragging me out to the back of a fast-food restaurant and dumping me in along with all my new friends: the rats and decaying leftovers. We’ll make quite the dreadful pack one day; they’ll all love me proper. 

“Are you okay?” she quickly asked. He nodded with no little amount of haste. 

“Y-yeah I just. Fell. Over there,” He motioned at a very unspecific spot behind himself in the hopes that she wouldn’t follow his hand’s gesture and actually ask where. 

Instead, she inquired, “Where are your parents?” 

“They’re…” he tried on a whim — pointless, really. 

Everyone knew because the school’s staff went full-disclosure on his ass every single time he entered a new class, the better to ensure the rest of the kids knew exactly why they had to be _extra_ nice to him. 

Better to be honest than pitied for attempting to lie himself out of this one.

“I don’t have any,” he confessed, and found that the fact didn’t really hurt him. At least not anymore. “I’m — I live with a foster family.” 

“Oh,” she repeated, eyes subtly twitching at that like it instantly clicked. Mostly kids his age would've ask for further elaboration on what the heck that meant. She didn’t. 

But her left ankle kept idly rolling itself over some dirt as she seemingly fidgeted with what to do next and not for the first time, Ed wanted to squirm himself out of existence. He never seems to be able to bleed alone. 

It didn’t take too long for Winry to reach a resolution, because it never does, and she looked at him again with a small frown dancing around her features, her lips tensed in a firm line. 

“Come with me, then,” she declared. “My granny’s got rubbing alcohol, and some cotton. And I live right over there,” she said, pointing. 

Ed kind of laughs now, at how he can’t for the life of him remember what sort of flimsy excuse he came up with to try and stop that from happening. Point is, it wasn’t enough for Winry, she dragged him over to her doorstep and took a single key from out of her right sock and pushed him inside for the first time ever. 

“And who’s this?” Pinako asked, not really looking away from the book in her lap as she sat under a leisurely halo of her own smoke. An intimidating enough sight for any type of adult, let alone his wee self.

His cue to act only became clear thanks to Winry purposely bumping into his side while her granny wasn’t looking. “He’s, um —” A pointed look. 

“E-Edward,” he said. 

“Ed! Yeah, for sure,” she echoed. “Edward.”

“And why is Edward bleeding all over our carpet?” 

That’s a moment in which he should’ve bolted — that’s one of the many in which he could have run out so fast he would’ve left but a dusted ghost shaped after his silhouette behind him. The fact that he didn’t only ever reminds him of how inevitable some things are. Of how, if there even is a God, it’s just there to take away your speech capacity without a moment’s notice and thus tie you to the ground with the inevitability of things and say something like ‘ _This is where you’re meant to be_ ,’ or whatever statement can be equally dramatic. 

It kind of felt like that when he took that powder off that guy Roa’s meaty fingers. The one still waiting on him like the other side of a pendulum with an open mouth. 

“It was my fault, I tripped him,” Winry spat. “By accident, obviously, but it looks pretty bad so maybe we should get some cotton?” she concluded with a winning smile as Ed gaped at her.

Somehow it ended with him having dinner and watching TV with Winry and made to promise he wouldn’t try to take care of things all by himself if shit like that ever happened again. Winry chirped an affirmative without a sliver of hesitance, but Pinako saw right through them both without even wearing her glasses. 

She narrowed her eyes at him and extended the offer to any and all “pain-related” events in the future, trying as much as she could to convey her true meaning with that same type of subtle foreboding adults exhort onto children while trying to not be too graphic about their circumstance, throwing line upon line of subtext hoping it’ll stick and they’ll willingly take the lifeline, next time. 

It did stick. People did always tell him he was plenty smart for someone his age and with his type of impediments. 

They finally arrive at a tattoo studio where this Garfiel guy (with a probably made-up name) warmly greets them while holding up a piercing gun. He watches Winry mildly squirm under the impending pain and clench her eyes shut as it happens, but after its done there’s not a single trace of discomfort in any of her features. 

She beams at him and tells him all about how ‘cute’ he would look with an ear piercing or twenty. 

Mr. Garfiel agrees. “ _So_ cute,” he gushes. “Could be one on each ear, something simple — something classy, easily concealed.”

“How easy?” he asks, if only for the sake of conversation. “Dante catches me with ‘em and she’ll cut my balls off with craft scissors.” 

“Whatever,” Winry tells him, but not before Mr. Garfiel has already handed Ed a sample board of the assorted earrings. “Be lame, this is your life.” 

He looks down at some golden little hoops and studs and what are apparently called ‘huggies’ and frowns despite himself. Not because they aren’t pretty — pretty much all the contrary. It’s always been a problem to come face to face with shining, unblemished, natural beauty, he thinks, because it certainly shows him that an outside world exists, despite all the weight he brings into it. 

Such a thought has invaded him before, and it’s got nothing to do with how nice Roy looks, for example, with so little effort put into it — and not just because it’s part of his suave ‘ _Ooh damn, I’m so fit and mysterious_ ’ bullshit routine. But because it’s true to his fucking face. His strong hands, his pretty nose, his defined jawbone, his long lashes. The inconceivable yet perfect mixture between cute and attractive and masculine-hot. He, the alchemist. 

Ed considers the small golden hoop held between his thumb and pointer, he rolls it and admires how the light catches on, like it’s trapped and drowning along its inherent luster. He empathizes with how that must feel, although it’s pretty obvious he doesn’t look good on Mustang like luminescence does on gold. 

Luisa, sure, she’s got that feminine grace to her despite the trail of mud she’s been dragged through. Him, though. He doesn’t ever know where he stands and it fucking shows. Some people think it weird — others straight up hate the ambivalence. Hate that he doesn’t ever change it, that he doesn’t care for being accommodating. 

He never cut his hair despite all of Dante’s most creative threats, and even though it isn’t meant to be an insult to anyone in particular, Ed will gladly carry it as one if the situation calls for it. 

He sighs; a piece of his apprehension slides out only to be sucked back in with the next breath.

The most pathetic part of it all boils down to how it’s only been two days since last he and Roy saw each other — last touched one another, last talked. Since he got so fucking turned on after a couple of ferris wheel turns that his brain just fucking quit. But he knew they’d eventually have to get physical, it’d be stupid to so much as try to pretend he didn’t. So much making out tends to be a one-way path upwards. He knew. 

He really shouldn’t be so glued to the memory of what transpired. Mustang’s probably forgotten all about it in favor of reminiscing his past achievements in the fields of mind melting sex and super fun carefree exploits. Past Carnivals. Other people. 

As if maneuvering across a monkey bar, his mind goes from one thought to the next, latching on to increasing levels of agony.

They leave the studio and Winry proposes they swing through her place to grab something to eat before dropping him off. He can’t bring himself to even fathom the idea of food and his throat instantly contracts when faced with the prospect; he thanks her anyway. 

The tingling at the pit of his stomach is only growing stronger with each passing minute that his reeling mind doesn’t think to shut up. It’s only natural that when she goes about asking, he can only clench his jaw in response. 

“So how’s it going with that Mustang guy?” She doesn’t even look directly at him while saying it, rather adjusts the rearview mirror before turning the keys. Ed thinks he’s never been more grateful for the rumbling sound that fills the air and hums through the seating while he tries to come up with something satisfying to say. 

He gives a very nondescript answer and she leaves it at that. What he really should say is how, “ _He’s really nice_ ”. 

Really he should be asking her her opinion on things, on why he’s so — indeed — lame. Why he can’t let Roy just touch his dick if he wants to and not make a huge fucking deal out of every little thing. The thing is, he actually has been nice to Ed. No joke. Accommodating and gentle and he laughs at the dumb shit he says and humors him with listening to some rambles here and there without either asking him to shut up or casually trying to stir the conversation away from the subject matter. 

He oughta be grateful for at least that. 

Some moments you hang on to no matter their eventual outcome. They hold value in themselves. 

The streets are near empty as they drive by. It’ll be a slow afternoon, so he can count his blessings and admit that that’s at least a good thing. 

“ _He’s really nice_ ,” he hears, sitting on his thoughts like a heavy blanket woven with dismay.

“ _You should be aware of how much he likes it._ ”

He manages not to knock his teeth out on the edge of the sidewalk once Winry drops him off. That’s also a good thing.

*

Roy doesn’t show up on Tuesday either.

It’s an action so objectively trivial Ed cannot compute how significant it actually feels. 

The main thing to focus on is the fact that he doesn’t owe Ed a single thing, and this he’s known since the very beginning. Consequently, Ed doesn’t owe him either, a realization that should at least bring him a tiny dose of relief but doesn’t so much as flick his growing panic in the nose.

It does feel like drowning. Not that he’s ever had the pleasure of experiencing such a thing. 

He walks up and down the bursting halls with growing urgency, it could be posed as common knowledge that physically fretting does nothing to calm you down, but it’s gotten to a point where any amount of passing giggles seem too obviously directed at him and any feeble little fragments of sense and sanity he tries thinking up immediately turn against him, transforming into further reasons he should be stressing out. 

The fact that they’re probably through doesn’t seem to matter enough that Mustang would have a laugh about it with anyone — at the same time, that’s all the more reason why he shouldn’t give a single fuck and share what a godawful experience he had to go through last Saturday night. 

People ask about it to all of their acquaintances in accordance with unwritten teenage protocol. Ask. Get people to speak out of pure nerves. Push your friends to oversharing and revel in the consequences. 

Roy could have easily run his mouth with any amount of grief, provoked by the traumatizing event that was trying to fuck that trembling lump of flesh that couldn’t be bothered to signal properly. Like he didn’t know how to speak at all. Like he was anchored to the moment, sprawled on the inside of a car; a clearly dense creature that has trouble with things like _breathing_. 

Ed gets really close to dredging up enough courage to send a casual one liner that spews as little interest as possible. Something akin to ‘ _u alive?_ ’ 

His fingers tremble so bad he scarcely manages to glare at the empty screen before putting his phone away and burying himself in his assigned work as he tries (and fails) to ignore how the people at the front twist their necks to look in his direction. He keeps throwing his undivided attention on the notes he’s taken, reading the same sentence again and again and again even if it’s long since lost its meaning. 

By the end of the day he’s left behind, along with the scrambled chairs and swaying doors. Everything topples over and he’s on his knees, puking into the toilet with nothing but the soft echo of an emptied bathroom and the stall’s nasty doodles as a noble companion. He wipes his mouth, re-does the ponytail with some haste that leaves him feeling almost as disheveled as before, flushes the toilet and brings the lid down to sit on it. His bearings roam around aseptic air with no real intention of letting themselves be gathered. 

Ed distantly wonders if he should be worried about the afternoon shift janitor coming to lock him up, but he honestly couldn’t stand right now if they paid him a billion dollars and gave him divine, oracle-approved certainty that everything was gonna be alright.

Nausea is one thing, vomiting is another. Living to tell the tale is entirely different, too. He hates the aftershocks that still run up-and-down his spine, still wringing potent shivers out of him. He yanks a paper towel from the dispenser to his right to spit on — repeatedly. He isn’t feeling any better after lurching, this is bad. This is bad. He should look to change something about the loop he’s found himself in, do something different. 

His everything hurts too much to draw any rational conclusions, but it’s while staring at a very badly drawn pair of sharpie tits on the door in front of him that some clarity finally comes: he should apologize to Roy. 

Perhaps wait until he actually shows up and look for a discreet, casual opening to talk whenever their schedules converge, such as Kimblee or Izumi’s class. Laugh a little, if possible, don’t get in the way. Be fucking circumspect about the whole thing. He misled him, he wasted his time and breath and spit. He ruined both their trips, he probably made him feel awful — or maybe not, maybe that’s giving himself too much credit. 

Still, there’s gotta be a price to the ego he hurt. He’ll have to pay up for that, too, won’t he? But maybe then the toll will be lessened, maybe he’ll get enough pity to sail through the rest of his years in this shit-stain of a town without getting too much grief about it. Winry still exists, and he’ll never not be too embarrassed to talk about it, but she’s still out there, somewhere, smiling, skipping, being reliable as fuck. Not everyone can be like that. 

His finger joints spasm for a second in acute pain and he winces. Either way, he should say sorry. That’s gotta be the plan. He closes his eyes.

Say sorry, keep walking. 

Say sorry. 

There’s a list of girl’s names crossed out around the bottom right where his gaze lands while wandering. That old tale. 

It’s a terrible thing to be an item in a checkbox, something he reckons a lot of people should say sorry for, too. 

A lot of people should be sent to the fucking funny farm for the shit they write on here, as far as Ed’s concerned. The things he’s seen couldn’t even be explained through the sheer daily boredom that guys around these parts are constantly exposed to. If all forms of entertainment really come down to either score some crystal cut with rat poison or one-up each other on who develops the most violent sexual fantasy a person could have involving their English Literature classmates — they should see about some good old collective suicide. 

Ed blinks at the list, letting red frustration wash through his body like an undercurrent. It doesn’t mix well with how bruised he already feels. 

He reads through it for about the fourth or fifth consecutive time. 

_Sophie_

_Lena_

_Maria_

_Abigail_

_Luisa_

Every uneven breath he manages to take cements him farther into the realization of what might’ve truly been happening all along.

Fucking hell, does that hurt. Getting in so deep only to be an added footnote at the end of someone’s memorable sexploits. Perhaps he should’ve just showed him. The marks that brand him like coiling little hands. At least then they could’ve gotten somewhere — maybe. He tells himself there’s no way of knowing that for sure, but everything keeps obstinately pointing out how then, just maybe, that would’ve been a memorable night — not in a good way, no. But it would’ve been something. Not this. 

People already stare. It was never part of the plan to give them further reason to ogle, but a mid-tier scandal born from out of the district’s only higher education institution can be a thing for the ages. Ed wouldn’t mind it so much were it not for the fact that every single adult in the area seems to know each other from that vague memory dump known as _Back In The Day._

People at convenience stores claim to still be able to smell the condensed sugar from the soda dispenser in the cafeteria that got jammed back in ‘86. With every single last name tattooed in people’s mental rolodex, Ed can only be relieved to think he won’t stick around for long after he’s finally eighteen. He’ll get through it while he has to, sure, but he doesn’t want to be backhanded by life like this forever. 

It’ll go away, he knows. Eventually, and just like everything before it, it’ll have to go away, expelled by the obligated passing of time — except maybe it won’t, and all he can do is try and pray it off.

There’s gotta be something about himself in one of these stalls. If there isn’t, it’s likely kept safe in the recent memories of whoever it is Mustang ranted to about the way he squirmed like a worm under his eyes. About how pathetically his breath hitched every time he went for a button. About the mangled flesh he didn’t get a peek of — unfortunately. But he got close. 

Very, very close. 

Ed looks at the names again.

There are some annotations on the edges of that fucked up list, crammed together in a myriad of different handwritings that reach the door’s hinges and then climb along their length like a trail of ants. He leans closer and reads them all while regretting the chronic condition known as being woefully alive. 

Why do guys come in here with pens and sharpies tucked into their pockets? They don’t make the time to wash their hands after taking a shit but sure as fuck leave these short-story-sized prose cesspools about how much they jerk off to this or that — sometimes even scratched on the ratty door with their car keys. 

Who does he take it up with if he’s a guy who happens to be into guys and then also fucking _hates_ guys, all of them, including himself? 

He re-reads the added commentary as the bitten flesh on his left pointer finds its way between his teeth. He decidedly doesn’t recognize Roy’s written letter (or anything remotely like it) amongst any of those scratches. The relief that washes over him is daunting only because it proves just how horrible his expectations had come to be. 

Either way, there’s a growing suspicion that’s seconds away from landing in fact. Undeniable, cold and hard. Like a door closing behind himself. 

His mouth promptly fills with the taste of metal and he takes his finger out to see the source of all of it. His head’s thumping to such a heavy rhythm that the sudden disfigurement of his now bloody fingernail doesn’t seem to register as particularly painful. It isn’t, really, not with all of the things he’s got to compare this injury to. Lucky. 

There’s a sentence managed in grating blue ink beside Luisa’s name: _Mustang’s dick finally fell off in this one._

Below it, an arrow hooked from Roy’s circled last name: _nympho fuck._

*

8:05 pm

The ride back home from work is bumpier as usual, but maybe it’s just him, this time. Still, someone should write a letter to their district representative. Someone should write a lot of letters. Potholes, unmarked streets, trash riddled community centers, the fact that teachers use the same exact eraser every single year. He recognizes the dent from one of them, top corner. 

Ed sags against the bus window. It doesn’t take long for his pain to sort of die down if he has a good place in which to prop his feet up and relax for a while — which the bus is empty enough for him to do —, but it’s still there (because of course he isn’t fucking “relaxing”) and so is the powdered marvel that was promised to him. There, as in, sitting in his pocket, steadily burning a hole into his skin. 

He’ll never leave his gear lying around the house again, not after the Bradley incident. Thinking back on it, there’s a clear silver lining, waiting to be taken full advantage of. It worked as a sort of warning for him to double his caution and triple his suspicion. It worked because it was like a message from above. 

Streetlights pass through his line of sight like drunken flash mosquitoes. It doesn’t take long before he takes his phone out and opens an incognito search window. 

He should’ve known there’s a forum for practically anything the mind can set it’s eye to, and so a few taps later he’s landed himself on his very own island of custom-cut information, reading through a vast account of other people’s misfortune — but hey, there’s also some pretty useful stuff.

There’s a user whose inquiry seems… worthwhile.

Framed by a pretty austere background design, a bright blue with a low visibility setting bar has him reading the date October 25th, 2013.

 **EST [16:07:22]** pancakekitty

_hey, first time opiate user here. just got some china white n i was wondering how much i should smoke/snort of it if its my first time. have some past experience with meth slamming and all, but i still haven’t tried this one,_

_thanks_

**EST [23:11:45]** dietlinde23

_Any fentanyl-related drugs are that much more likely to cause death by overdose, especially if you inhale them. Why not just jump off a cliff if it’s the buzz you’re after._

**EST [04:12:10** ] ArcaneChicxculub

_hello pancackekitty, if you’re a opioidsnewbie try snorting a teeny tiny bit at first. I’d say about 25 mgs. Although china isn’t typically made for smoking unless the base is pure heroin #3 (supposing we are talking about a heroin based china white, not some fentanyl cut crap)_

_If you don’t know what it’s cut with, snorting or inhaling can be a huge risk. I’ve seen stuff mixed with glass shards, cocaine or lime juice. I would say just start small if you want to snort, but this one’s better for injecting. If possible, make sure you’ve got some narcan at hand_

_Be safe, AC_

**EST [03:01:33]** sn1987a

_If you simply throw some china on foil and spark it, it’s bound to burn up without effect. To really smoke it you’d have to spray five to ten units of water on the surface area in order to make a paste, spread it into pre made trails on foil and then burn it._

_It’s a waste of product, though, in my opinion. Like AC said its not made for smoking, so unless you’re into speedballing, get yourself a disposable syringe and test the grammage (no bigger than half a spoon for starters), it’s a real hitter that way and will have you feeling the effects asap._

**EST [01:18:22]** pancakekitty

_thank you both for the straightforward replies. as far as the smack i’m getting i’m pretty sure it’ll be fentanyl cut shit. no sweat. it’s good to hear snorting’s not the way to go since i’ve got a busted septum._

Ed lays his head back a little, letting the ingested information roam around his head. The bodybuilder dude from the ice cream truck had pretty much warned him about most risks, excluding, of course, the shit components this thing apparently has.

Fentanyl. He rolls the word around his mouth, unuttered. Back at the clinic, it was a forbidden type of honey. 

Those negligent pieces of shit. 

Fentanyl. That’s easy to detect, but he’s run out of the usual strips he uses and it isn’t something you can test with common household products. It’s not like washing coke on acetone to define its purity.

A phlegmy older woman snaps him out of his thoughts for a second, she sits right across from him with a bursting bag of groceries placed in between her feet. He recoils his legs from where he had them splayed out on the seat next to her. 

If it’s main ingredient is ideally heroin then he could test for that, too. Hydrochloride monohydrate is usually soluble in 2 parts water, 11 parts alcohol. He’d be able to tell that component apart based on it alone, which isn’t hard, either, but fucking takes a while. A while he doesn’t know he has, judging by the insistence of the strain in his arm, his skull, his every nerve. Judging by the stress-produced bile that’s gonna punch a hole through his intestines so soon he won’t make it out alive.

The woman coughs into a bunched up kleenex and it sounds like a wet bag, shuddering out in the open air. He wonders if he looks as beat-up. Without glancing at the darkened window beside him, he knows the answer. 

He looks back down at the screen and ponders. 

They’re still rounding the downtown area, perhaps it’s the thought of how slow they’re actually moving that sparks this sudden sense of urgency in him. He opens another tab, types in FunnyBear Ice Cream. 

It’s basic info pops up on the first screen — open ‘till nine-thirty. He taps the map — two blocks away at the moment. 

He looks for a reason not to gather his messenger bag into his arms and get up right that second — he looks in vain. 

He scours for some sort of reason why this is the worst idea he’s ever had while pressing the stop button on the side of the bar while looking at the moving street before him, just ahead of those opening doors. All they do all day is exactly that — open, close; close, open; fold and unfold. Not him, he isn’t static or stuck or repetitive. He’s not an object, he feels anger and overwhelming nerves and cold and pain. 

He’s a breathing, living thing when he moves forwards and his feet take him one step at a time, off the bus and into the night-time. Living, breathing, overthinking. 

Ed always thanks the drivers, he throws the gratitude over his shoulder before hopping down. Cold air is here to greet him, slam against his hair and face and shoulders. Brittle maple leaves roll around on the concrete and he walks like there’s a gun pressed to the back of his head — that’s not anyone’s fault. It’s just his style. 

He walks under white lamp posts, following the address indicated in his mind’s layout of these somewhat familiar streets. 

It doesn’t take him long at all before he’s standing in a frozen dream parlor. He doesn’t think much of the little round tables sprawled across the place; shining purple. It’s not a fitting place for him to feel so out of his league because the logo is an actual teddy bear with a red cowboy hat, but he still slams his palm onto the little bell at the top of the counter because it’s their fault for actually having one of these things in the first place. 

The bony bald man from before makes an appearance, even more sick-locking up this close. 

“Where’s Roa,” Ed says, surprised by the steady demand in his voice. 

The guy huffs, crossing his arms. “Not satisfied with the product, mister?” He smiles, showing teeth. 

Intensity topples over in his chest, Ed snorts with ardor. “You mean that shitty mixed gear you wrung forty-plus bucks out of me for?” 

It doesn’t take long from there, either. 

He’s being shushed by this bug-eyed individual that scratches the cracked skin on his forearm way too much. He’s being beckoned over to behind the stall, then grabbed by the elbow by some hard, skinny fingers. It’s from up this close that he can appreciate the round sores that decorate practically every patch of skin. He’s like some kind of meth jaguar, but Ed doesn’t pull away.

Rather he finds himself in the behind-the-scenes of the store amongst buckets of half-melted icy sugar. The temperature drops considerably. 

“What now, kid.” The guy — Roa, as he happens to know — turns to him while tossing a rag over his shoulder. There’s a hint of a smirk threatening to grow at the corners of his mouth and he still wears a tight tank top, despite the chilled temperature of this giant freezer. 

Ed stares at him, he stares back for a second before quirking an eyebrow. 

From there, it doesn’t take longer than a few minutes. 

It takes close to nothing for his intentions to become crystal clear — even to himself. There’s an air of finality to the way things go down, at the end, as there very well should be to grant this stupid, ill-advised moment even a just a single flake of meaning. 

The light in here doesn’t flicker. It’s still not ideal and it isn’t quite pretty, but it ain’t no cautionary tale, either. 

Roa towers over him with strongly squared shoulders and a scrutinizing look he can’t quite place. He doesn’t care to do so, either. 

There’s a weird tang of a taste behind his teeth, the sweat he gathered from power-walking here isn’t well accompanied by the sudden punch of cold he feels, like the stale, sweetened air is touching all the wrong parts. Yet the nondescript grime on the floor doesn’t bother him, neither does the entire weight of the world because he feels like he just figured something out, something no one else had managed before him, like he’s done check-mate, or at least gotten darn close. 

A grin breaks out, despite himself, and from there it only takes _seconds_.

Roa kneels in front of him as his back is pressed against the hard tiles of the service bathroom, next to a slumped dirty mop. He shuffles about on his calves while shaking his head in what is very obviously feigned annoyance. “Didn’t even bring your own equipment,” he grumbles. 

Ed smiles again. His fingers curl around his sleeve and he rolls it up. 

“Cut the crap,” he states. “What is this, really?”

Roa smirks while a lighter sparks under the world-renowned, indeed very well-liked metal utensil which he’s made sure isn’t even half full. Just about a third will do to see if these shits are lying. The underside of the man’s chin is accentuated by this little flame's light, it makes him look sharper. Still there’s nothing to flinch about, they could’ve kicked him out but decided to do him this solid. It’s their funeral, now. 

The clustered scar-tissue running up and down his skin like epileptic zig-zags make it obvious, his right arm’s no good for shooting and he isn’t ambidextrous. 

“Only the best.” Roa tells him. “We don’t mess around like Tringham — fasten this over your vein,” He hands him a small fabric belt with plastic loops and a plastic buckle. Could be worse. Could be a shoelace. 

Maybe it’s all true enough. Ed is confident this medication’s nothing above a steady 60% in terms of purity, even if this does seem to be a more or less organized operation they got going on here. Fucking Greg, how in the fuck does he even _find_ these people. 

He could confect some top-tier smack himself if he put his mind to it. Easy. There’s little to it but getting the molecular formula and molar mass right, a little morphine and acetic anhydride — or he could grow fucking poppy flowers himself. He starts turning over the components in his mind, one by one, thinking of lower OD risks in terms of potency more evenly distributed within its surface area. Thinking lasting effects with lower posthumous drought symptoms, thinking of focused neurotransmitter stimulation for heightened pain relief. 

He picks it apart and then swiftly puts it back together, watching the formula stitch itself new in his mind. It’s never too difficult.

He doesn’t get how so many people fuck this one up. 

“Not afraid they’re gonna bust your asses for daring to compete?” he prods, arm now fully exposed. 

“Kid,” Roa deadpans. “Considering the quality of that red filth of theirs, sniffin’ glue counts as competition.” He flicks the syringe once — twice, then lowers it to where Ed refuses to see or follow. 

“Sure, but I heard Nash is pretty brutal,” he goes on while focusing on the room’s upper corner where a small cobweb seems to be forming as they speak.

“Mhm?” Roa hums. Ed runs the back of his gloved hand over his nose, sniffing. 

“He got the younger one —” A twinge. “Fletcher.” Gone in a second. “He got ‘im to start dealing like a year ago. He was like eleven and tried sellin’ me these pills one day, I remember, very mid-tier uppers he had. Couldn’t even bother to wipe the snot off his face.” He gives a wan laugh as the liquid starts making itself known through his arm. 

It somehow feels cold, even if the medicine has been practically boiled seconds prior. Maybe this kind of stuff’s as harsh as the things you say before shooting up. 

He doesn’t think to ask if that’s normal — if any of this is. 

He dies here, and it’ll be these assholes’ problems. That’s his current logic. 

If he lives, well. That’s a problem for another day, because the floating stream inside his veins pumps once, twice, and then Roa’s batting his hand all over his line of sight. 

“This,” he motions downwards. “You always do.” Ed already feels a screaming whisper tingle over to his very ventricles, it’s like a swing, only up and down. A sparkling elevator. 

“Yeah,” he gasps in understanding. It’s his blood, drawn back into the tube so he can witness it mingle with the rest of the remedy inside the crystal barrel right before Roa presses the plunger and shoves all of it back in. His thumb stops at the hilt and then — _then_ he feels it, like a lights-out type of gut-punch. 

Or something like it. Something very similar. 

Very. 

It’s not bad… Not bad at all. It feels a lot like what he’s done before, the lethargic hum of a good opiate, about to buzz your brain off and drag you underground, only very obviously different. Loud and clear and all up in his face. Amped up like a gigantic bubble in his chest, filled to the brim and about to burst. 

He gasps although breathing suddenly doesn’t feel as necessary — at least not like that fastidious chore he had to go through a thousand times a day, every single day of his life. It’s like realizing you’re doomed to never stop thinking. Just thinking and thinking and tossing and turning, even in your sleep, every hour of every day you scheme and mechanize and carry a brain that chews itself out until you finally lay down and die — unless, he’s at the exception right this second.

The bubble inside him wobbles and it immediately rips an involuntary laugh out of him. 

Roa snickers in response. “What was it you were saying? Something about mixed shitty gear?” He stands up and Ed doesn’t follow, just lets his eyes rest on the man’s clothed knees as he lingers right in front of him. “Where’s those forty-something bucks now,” he keeps teasing, the corner of Ed’s mouth pulls itself upwards without him meaning it to. 

He hears the smaller man sniffle from behind, over by the cracked door. 

“Tell Nash he’s playing with the big boys, now.” 

Ed rests his head against the abandoned shower’s corner, something at the back of his mind wondering if this should feel as comfortable as it does. Like the hardness of the tile isn’t solid at all. 

“He killed my friend, y’know,” slips off of his tongue, heavy, soft-spoken, dropped like hot honey onto his lap. 

He hears it being said from afar, as if from way over there, behind the Grand Canyon. Ed can only agree with it all — yeah, he nods a little, or a lot, or maybe only thinks he does but the movement is still there. There is movement, and it’s honest and heartfelt and every single hair on him feels the fabric of his clothes scratch against it and is filled with prickling contentment.

His limbs are forgotten at his sides, all four poles of them. 

No screaming nerves or burning muscle, yes, this is exactly what he came here for. A thousand times yes. 

“Did he?” Roa sort of grunts from above. 

“Yeah…,” he responds. 

Rose. 

He doesn’t say the name or maybe he does. Fuck, its good. It’s so, so, so good and delicious like — like he’s eating homemade pie and he’s got a steaming, cinnamon-sprinkled slice in one hand while skating through an empty ballroom wearing only his socks. The woolen ones, the ones that slide. 

He moves around an oval-shaped waxed floor with ease, like his whole body is but a deep, pacifying sigh, dissipating in the air, turning breath into a long, luminous day. 

If people could only see him right now, twirling and getting fat on glimmering pie crust they’d applaud and cheer him on. It’s so warm. Thawed cubes of honeyed apple sit on his tongue like he caught a star, he can taste it. 

“Sorry about that,” Roa speaks but he doesn’t hear the question or the statement or what went before — _sorry_? 

There’s a sympathy to his voice, a sort of hushness he’d never sensed before. Never ever. He’s not the father-type — Ed doesn’t know who _is_ — but something about the man makes him trust. Give in. Bend. 

They could very well decide to empty his pockets right now. Rape him. Stick another needle in just to see what happens. 

Instead Roa goes on, lower, this time, like he’s moving away. “Must’ve been pretty tough.” 

Ed’s knees slowly fold up towards his chest. He takes a single breath in as the curtains open up. Ah.

There’d been good times before like worn shoes or good pills and long naps with singing crickets and books that smell of warm dust — nothing like this. Light fills the air as it does his veins, bustling with giddy zeal.

A fuzzy interception, _finally_. A pause. He feels and greets and hugs it. 

A white, plain curtain, kind of like the wisps of air that danced around the sheets spread out on the laundry line back then. _Back In The Day._

White laundry. 

He laughs again and sags further against the merciful wall. It doesn’t judge him — it doesn’t — it’s all he needs.

Where in the shit had this been hiding all his life? 

A few seconds pass. Impossible to gauge. 

He doesn’t have to look to know that he’s been left alone, and that’s alright, too. 

That’s more than alright, because the lights are still on and he still smells a hint of that bleach solution in the mop’s unused bucket next to him but there’s something else in there, now, something like baked apple stuffed into the room, like he’s found himself inside an expanse of heated dough. 

Yeah. 

He hears a lengthy sound like from a wounded animal, or perhaps a hearty moan resounding against the walls. It takes him several outstretched moments to recognize himself as the origin of such a sound. Oh, _damn_.

He feels like singing a Christmas carol. This is excellent. 

Sleep eventually starts taking him under, the familiar muddy waters of all the accumulated exhaustion he’d managed to drag around with him for days as he sees the laundry appear in front of him once again — for the last time tonight — and wonders if this is not exactly what love’s supposed to feel like. 

He’d forgotten all about it. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> couldn't figure how to appropriately warn for this last scene without spoiling the whole ordeal so I hope you weren't upset by it, if u were let me know!!!


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy belated Valentine's! hope you had a nice enough day, and if you didn't then this is officially my (long) overdue gift to you all — as well as an apology chapter to make up for my previous cliffhanger clownery. The following installment will not contain any drug-related shenanigans or violent themes, but it will deal with depression, some sexual content, and a dash of heartfelt Angst because hey!!! this is still me writing this dumb story!! so! Still, get ready to have the rug placed back under your feet for now. Enjoy :)

Night-time comes again, long and dark. 

It’s an event so typical he can’t account for how ominous it feels. Every day of his life has been essentially marked by this same passage, yet now it’s as if the frail dried branches that caress his window are trying to speak through a transmuted form of morse code, clawing at the glass with bony fingers, trying to get under the covers with him. 

The distant shuffling from the floor below doesn’t at all sound like what it is — people moving around the kitchen and living room. They come to him as dissonant notes of cracked wood he can’t make any sense of for longer than it should take him to interpret. 

He’s done it; he’s finally losing his mind. 

It wasn’t supposed to get quite so bad, but whatever his expectations, he had better get on schedule sooner rather than later. 

Sooner rather than later — this is what he tells himself for a while, as if willing his mind and body to cooperate with a battered spirit, an absent brain. 

To say it’s been a rough patch would be a gross understatement. Roy hasn’t been able to leave his bed for three days. 

He doesn’t know if he’s got the count right, always either too asleep or too embarrassed to ask Chris for the date when she comes in to check that the lump under the comforter still moves with every breath. He sighs into the pillow, the one probably suffering from having the silhouette of his head carved into it for what seems to be eternity. Soon, he silently tells it, I’ll get up soon. 

It’s too warm for him to at the very least shift his neck a little, just a bit more to the side. Soon. 

He doesn’t move, and once again the clock ticks him away like a swatted fly. He lay curled on his side; a fly dreaming it’s a wounded possum on the side of the road dreaming it’s a fly — belly up and shackled to a cot made of dust. 

Still, he lets the muted prayer leave his lips for one last time before drifting again — _Soon; I’ll get up soon_. 

*

He’d like to start collecting fluff balls, the types that float around the air under dim lighting. 

The kinds that he can blow away with every single taxing breath. The kinds that tell him about how dusty his room has become, as if thinking itself abandoned, unaware that there’s technically still something periodically shifting there, below the covers. Breathing in the dark. 

He’d like to start collecting fluff balls and stuffing them in his mouth. 

If it were even possible. If possibility even mattered. 

If his legs worked he’d go throw himself down the stairs and open the freezer to stick his head in. Greet the peas and the berries. Wait until he passed out standing. 

He should’ve seen this coming. Maybe he won’t get to live and learn the lesson about how stimulants aren’t manufactured for people like him. 

But then, it can't all be on that magnificent powder. There’s the undeniable fact that he shouldn’t have seen those pictures. The ones hidden amongst a myriad of unremarkable developed photographs Chris had stashed together into a makeshift photo album, all adhesive tape and coffee-stained cardboard sheets. 

One showed the three of them, in what just happened to be the beginning of time. 

He didn’t recognize himself as a baby, having never seen such a clear picture of himself at that age. The image, obviously, didn’t care if he liked it or not — it simply showed the truth. 

“ _Your dad was ex-military,_ ” Chris had informed him while he flicked his eyes from one face to the next, holding each static gaze for a few seconds before returning to the other like a ping-pong ball. 

This was Sunday morning, during the first few hours of feeble light that graced the streets after the Carnival, when he came tumbling into the kitchen like a walking corpse to down a liter of water and accidentally caught sight of the little notebook, tossed along a stack of papers over the microwave. He hadn’t stopped himself from reaching out. 

“ _Both his parents had migrated from a little town in Matsuyama pretty young, but neither of them spoke a crumb of English. Your grandma, I think, she got her hands on a copy of that Harper Lee novel, To—_ ”

“ _To Kill a Mockingbird,_ ” he near-whispered while he settled on himself, held by his father’s arms; his father, who looked at the camera with a seemingly unbothered, rather neutral glance. His mother smiled at him, and only him — not her son or the lens or the people in the background. Not a spacious park with sculpted pine trees. Not at the spacious park with sculpted pine trees that lay behind her. She held his elbow like clinging to dear life from it; she smiled. 

“ _That’s the one_ ,” she intoned along the smoke that usually accompanies her morning coffee. She also came out of nowhere and startled him out of his socks for a moment, but thankfully didn’t comment on his sorry state. His obviously-drugged-out, shouldn’t-have-been-driving, caked-in-dust-and-cigarette-ash sorry ass state. 

There she was, barely getting ready for the day at 5 am while he stumbled around to gather even a single iota of coherency that wasn’t tainted by a slightly spinning room, still reeking of liquorice and really bad decisions. 

“ _Legend has it she mostly taught herself reading that book, and so when she got pregnant with your dad, she settled on Tom after that Tom Robinson character,_ ” she chuckled. “ _Outsiders_ _ha_ —”

“ _Stop_.” He meant it. Of course sustaining a deep conversation about one's estranged parents wasn't something best done while stepping into what was sure to be a killer hangover, but a predominant part of him truly didn’t want to humanize the man that’d hung himself in their home’s kitchen and driven his mother crazy with grief — or so he’d been told. 

He doesn’t really remember, but Chris’d never given him a single reason to doubt her word. 

Yet he kept looking and turning until he stumbled across another picture — and this one was a series, taken from the insides of a hokey photo booth, colored in a faint granite that just screamed mid-nineties resolution. 

The thing is, or rather, was, that his parents were both undeniably attractive people. Yes, attractive was the term. Irredeemably so. He reckons his mother still is, wherever she might be. It should come in handy to her from time to time, as it does to him. 

They were good-looking. 

Even if they started off with nothing and Lila Mustang never graduated high school in favor of getting married with a man a lot older than her and he took her last name to avoid certain streaks of bigotry — they were stunning, and something about the assessment struck a nerve deep within him, something he couldn’t quite place. Something raw and stinging. 

Or maybe it was just the way the pictures had come out, blurry with the movement of them hungrily kissing each-other, with her sitting on his lap, laughing at the way his hand rested on her upper thigh and was partially concealed by the plaid skirt she wore. She, in turn, touched his shoulders, pulled on the collar of his shirt, traced his sharp jaw, leaned into him like she wanted to disappear inside his body and never ever come out. 

They were fucking lewd. There was no logic to him seeing them as so. He’d never been one to get easily scandalized by other people’s sexual lives, and these two individuals were practical strangers. Still certain imagery came to mind, the remnants of some early memories, reaped through his dabbling in vintage porn within abandoned magazines sitting in stacks at the bottom of the bar when he was younger. A lot younger. He saw women dressed as schoolgirls and men doing the whole James Dean routine. A motif of sexually charged sunglasses, jean jackets and shiny earrings he now witnessed on his two supposed makers. 

Something about the image made caustic bile travel up his throat, but he attributed it to the first clawing signs of the world-known serotonin drop that came after a supposedly happy night. 

Maybe it was the memory of what he’d done to Ed just hours before, still too fresh, still too close. The things he’d visibly put him through in his car. Shame was starting to coil around his stomach.

It’s the molly’s fault he took it so hard. He knows. 

It’s not like he never thought about them. His parents. It’s not like he never wondered about what those two strange people had done with themselves during their shared time on this plane of existence, he did. He’d often lie awake while staring at the ceiling, watching car lights skitter by as well as the long shadows they brushed past. It didn’t take long for him to pick up some new hobbies, so as soon as he got his permit and Chirs unexpectedly decided to let him have their car, he started driving around to replace those many lost hours of sleep. Most streets were desolate enough during the daylight, and the headlights guided him well enough through even tarmac and abandoned storefronts. Soon, he found out it wasn’t really enough. 

It didn’t stop the inconvenient ‘what if’s’ from leaking into his mind, it didn’t stop him from wondering if he’d been hated from birth, or even worse, simply ignored. It didn’t stop this mind-grating fear he had of simply asking Chris, for she probably knew all about it — was he a pull-out type of accident? Had his father offed himself because of him? He knew she wouldn’t lie, not even for his sake, and so all he could do was wonder.

But Roy Mustang was the first in his grade to have ever gotten his hands on a perfectly manufactured fake ID, and this definitely garnered him some attention. It’s fair to clarify that he hadn’t really done it for that purpose, as well as the fact that persuading one of his aunt’s out-of-town shady regulars to hook him up with one was one of his first-ever accomplishments in the art of persuasion — as well as one of the easiest tasks he’d ever embarked on. The guy was a weak-willed pencil pusher during the day who offered this covert service from the back of his car, where a probably stolen laminating machine ran if plugged to a long enough extension. Still, it had felt sort of sensational to have managed that on his own. 

Roy Mustang soon became well known amongst the older crowd from different grades, which implied constant invitations to events he knew he was only included in because of his newly-found access to alcohol. This was fine — he soon found out that he quite enjoyed drinking, too. In a matter of a few weeks, he became just another fifteen-year-old with too many friends, a lot of unearned independence, and a monstrous tolerance for intoxicating beverages. He went with it. 

It was only fate that he’d eventually stumble. A matter of time until he had to face those thoughts again. That old tale — _his_. He adjusts the covers tightly around his neck. 

It was the molly’s fault he took it so hard. Indeed. He doesn’t say anything when the odd knock comes on his door, momentarily waking him from this hazy slumber. ‘I think I’m coming down with something’ is not much of an excuse anymore. By now, it’s as good as code for ‘ _We need to up the Prozac dose; I can’t feel my hands, I can’t feel my legs, I can’t feel myself breathing_ ’. Chris acknowledges this with a rough hum in the distance, but she doesn’t hold it against him. 

He still can’t bring himself to speak in clear terms. It’s pathetic enough that a forgotten little family album can do him in like this. 

The fact that his parents thought of him as this novel yet secondary little piece of their life as a married couple was too obvious. Or perhaps he reads people too well — or perhaps he reads into nothing, so much and so deep and so intricate that he convinces himself of seeing things that aren’t there—, but he caught on to something that was by all means meant to be hidden within the confines of this very faint subtext ingrained in their expressions and body language. 

There was this one picture where he must’ve been around two or three, tops. It showed the couple leaning into each other under the blessing of these very lovey-dovey PDA conventions, ones he’s guilty of knowing all-too-well. Hands intertwined and another — his — resting around her shoulders. Like a half-hug. Slight squeeze, curled fingers, leaning into her — a classic. Roy felt burned by the piece of paper in his hands but couldn’t take his sight away from how this younger version of him leaned against his mother’s side, like an afterthought of a person. His stomach clenched at the scene; how transparently a baby seeks other people’s warmth regardless of outwards rejection. His mother responded only to his father’s touch. 

Roy still looked at the camera, he held still for it, he hid two tiny hands between his knees. It was a studio photo. 

And under normal circumstances, none of this would’ve been a problem, at the very least not a problem that couldn’t have been dealt with through his own methods. And proven that they are. 

All he can do now is wait it out, same as he ever has. Receive excrement and circumstance with open arms, sleep it off. 

Woe is him, etcetera, etcetera.

*

Another day comes about. He cracks his eyes open to see the blinking clock on his bedside table point at noon. Fucking hell. 

He knows he’s at the edge of opportunity, if he managed to get into some pants and a decent enough shirt, he could drag himself down the stairs, confect an appearance, eat something that would technically qualify as brunch and make one Chris Mustang very, very happy. The type of happy she’d show with a lopsided grin and a harsh hair-ruffle. 

Instead, he lays still, counting every breath like he’s on a respirator until she comes to him again, pushing the door open with her shoulder. 

She’s holding an unlit menthol between her lips and an orange juice carton in one hand with his prescription gripped in the other — the pill bottle she keeps from him during days like these. What’s tedious about it is she has to make the trip to his room every few hours to dispense medication out of her own hand, effectively turning into a surveillance tower he can’t really complain about.

He knows its standard protocol, and it probably wouldn’t stir him so painfully were it not for the connection his brain does, now that he’s got his progenitor’s memory freshly settled at the back of his mind. Hell, it’s not even a memory. It’s borrowed nostalgia. 

“Wakey, wakey,” she rasps, muffled by the tobacco stick held between her teeth. 

“What’s _wakey_ about it,” he mumbles, rubbing both eyes with the heels of his hands. She sits on the edge of the bed again, placing the carton on the bureau and popping a pill in her hand. He unceremoniously takes it and proceeds to accept the offered juice, once she’s also unfolded the carton’s mouth for him. 

“School keeps callin’,” she says before lighting up. 

He finds he doesn’t quite mind the way cigarette smoke sticks to a room. There’s something oddly comforting about its ashy ambiance, even if he doesn’t care for smoking himself. 

Mostly, anyway.

If he runs his tongue over the back of his teeth with enough vigor he’s sure he can still taste the nicotine from Saturday evening. It’s probably still stuck to his fingers, too. Good thing Chris can never tell he reeks of it while drowning in her own smoke. 

“What’d you want me to say next,” she exhales towards the window she opened at some point, probably while he still slept. “I’ve already gone through the flu; chickenpox; state-championship chess tournament —”

“That’s Breda,” he says. 

“Hell, I’m running out of ideas. People don’t take this ailment of yours too seriously you know,” she smirks over her shoulder. 

“I know,” he says before taking another chug of orange juice, elbow beginning to shake from the strain of having his weight propped up on it. 

“Well you know my rule, just don’t give me any failing grades and the rest is free-range.” She roughly pats his leg over the comforter and thankfully refrains from making a free-range horse joke. He’d only forgive her for the fact that she, too, carries the burden of such a last name. Roy watches the smoke swirl about under the generous pale autumn light that’s decided to grace them with a clear day, and feels for the first time grateful about his diminished state of consciousness. 

It’s quite pleasant, if he may say so himself, to not be thinking at all for prolonged stretches of time. To share a silence like this one. 

“Oh — by the way,” Chris suddenly cuts their shared afternoon lethargy with a pointed look, a quirked eyebrow he can’t immediately place within his recollection of all her nonverbal cues. 

This proves alarming. 

“There’s this cute blond downstairs, says he’s in your chemistry class. Something about bringing over all that homework you’ve been missing,” 

It feels like someone snaps the puppet strings that were holding him upright (or lying down) on stage this entire time. The script also goes haywire. 

“Shit?” He doesn’t know why he’s framed it as an inquiry, but the panic in his voice is audible enough. So is the way he nearly chokes on the word. 

“Should I tell him to beat it?” Her lifted eyebrow is joined by its twin.

“No,” he immediately interjects, which only manages to garner further amusement from her. 

He knows getting up would be the least he could do, in terms of effort, given the situation, but there’s no vital strength he can hope to materialize out of the thin, stagnant air in order to manage so much as falling onto his back again, like a fish flopping on a boat’s surface. He distantly acknowledges how serious that is, but it is as unsurprising as ever when it comes to him and his brand of daily bullshit, so he settles on diverting his own attention. 

“What — ah, what day’s it?” He blinks at the texture of her veiny hand, decorated with a lot of chunky rings he’s sure she doesn’t take off to go to bed. She once told him something about "always being ready to punch a fucker’s lights out".

He wishes she could lend him even a fraction of that energy, right about now. 

“Thursday,” she answers casually before taking another drag. 

“Is he… It is a _he_ , right?” He squints into direct sunlight. 

She hums, coughs a little and then turns a coy smile to him. 

“So does your goth wood-nymph down there have a name?” The sound that rips out of him isn’t so much a groan, but rather something a small mammal would emit after being wrongfully kicked. 

At least it prompts him to start inching away from her. 

“Oh so it’s like that,” she goes on, flicking the string of ash out to the street. Roy hopes no one was walking by at that precise moment whilst wearing all black. Perhaps that’s what Edward’s completely covered in — head to toe, as usual. He thinks about the neat contrast between his dark layering and the gold of his hair and the urgent glint in his eye and the paleness of the skin on his stomach — thighs — collarbones. 

He notices the opposite edge of the bed only once he’s accidentally slumped onto the ground with a puncturing grunt. 

“Perhaps it’s for the best, huh,” she calls to him as he rolls around the wooden ground, the cold hardness of it nudging him awake without a thread of tact or gentleness. It’s just what he needs at the moment. “You haven’t showered in God knows how long, poor thing’ll be scandalized,” 

He takes a moment. A long one. 

“J’st gimme a minute,” he gently pleads while staring at the ceiling. 

“You don’t have to, you know,” she deadpans.

“I know — I.” He exhales. “I know.” Then he turns, placing both palms on the ground to push himself up, inch by painstaking inch until he’s at the very least sitting on his ass, staring at the accumulated dust between his legs and the general state of this endless martyrdom he sometimes calls a life. 

“Edward,” he gently speaks. “His name’s Edward,” _And he’s here to break things off with me,_ he imagines, _as well he fucking should._

Perhaps looking like death warmed over while greeting him will help seal the deal. It’ll all blow over in less than minutes and then Ed can hopefully go back to his life with as little qualms as possible about the whole calamity he was made to experience on Saturday night. 

He’s actively scrambling to put a coherent enough apology together when a pair of jeans fly across the expanse of his bed and smack against his side. He gasps at the contact. 

“Here, put those on,” Chris tells him, followed by the distinct sound of her labored breathing as she gets back up, followed then by the clicking of her shoes while moving closer to the window’s edge to put her cigarette out. She retreats towards the door. 

“I’ll give you ten minutes, poor creature’s probably sick of how Valerie’s chatting him up downstairs.” 

“Fuck,” Roy whispers, mostly to himself. 

He has never bothered to feel ashamed about his family’s trade, everyone knows a Mustang packs about as much blackmail material on each and every one of these mouthy townsfolk as a cargo train carries coal, so most just keep their opinions to themselves. It still doesn’t make it any less intimidating to have someone else come into his life as unexpectedly as this. 

He knows his family dynamics, ranging from a-little-too-liberal to the practiced but nonetheless exhausting explanation of ‘Not really my mom, not really my sister’, are less than traditional. 

Ed doesn’t seem to be the type to mind that, of course, but perhaps he’s only making wildly stereotypical assumptions about his own background and what that ought to entail. After all, they’ve never truly talked about it. Roy hasn’t the authority or high ground or right to go pounding into his intimacy like that. 

He knows he isn’t the judgmental type, but perhaps… Perhaps he doesn’t know shit. 

Roy squirms into his pants, crawls towards the drawers next to his closet and pulls a new shirt out. It’s a burgundy cotton one that reads to him as presentable enough — it smells it, too. 

He feels like he’s on death row, each passing second breathing down his neck, snapping at his heels as he struggles with both hands on the piece of furniture to haul himself up, he manages to sag against the surface once he’s made it a little past halfway down the line of ultra human effort (or what qualifies as it, according to his current perception, which sure, is a little broken and deficient but nonetheless present). 

Who could blame him? He practically hasn’t walked an inch in about four days. Did he even remember to pee, this time? 

A determined pant punches out of him and he seriously wonders if he isn’t dying. 

He hopes not to have to put Ed through the strain of witnessing his lifeless body, too. 

He stumbles to the bathroom, sticks his face under the running faucet, and combs his fingers through his hair. He stumbles back after squishing an awful amount of toothpaste straight onto his tongue before rinsing it out because _abhorrent_ is the word that best fits him while sailing through the downwards spiral of clinical depression. 

He sits on the bed, adjusts the cuffs of his socks and waits. 

He doesn’t yet have a healthy concept of time, his mind reels with all the catastrophe that can be fitted into a single second as a wind current rolls into his vacant bedroom. 

It’s getting closer and closer to what feels like what’s going to be the coldest winter he’s ever experienced. He shouldn’t adhere any particular meaning to that — yet he does. 

A few gentle knocks eventually graze the door and he straightens his back in response before saying “Come in,” with a tremble so telling he wishes he’d dissipate into thin air.

After something like the wind itself proceeds to brush the door open, Ed’s head pops in with certain hesitancy, as if waiting for further instruction to walk inside. Cross the threshold. It’s probably the pill, it’s probably the weather, it's probably how itchy his skin feels from having been shackled to his bed by these invisible bonds for days on end, but their eyes make contact and it’s as if they’re meeting for the very first time, all over again. 

He feels like he can’t fully open his, for one, and the glimmering hazel orbs that stare back seem to also reflect some sense of novelty. At the very least it’s not disgust. Not yet, anyway. 

“Hey,” Ed says from the doorway, and something about his voice sounds diminished, not only as a natural product of the distance put between them.

“Hey,” Roy breathes back. 

“I, um.” He gestures at the stack of books and papers bracketed against his chest. “I just thought you’d — I mean — finals are coming up. Izumi’s gonna take no prisoners, you know?” 

Roy swallows. “Come in.” 

So Ed does, gingerly and in slowed down movements like he’s walking around an active landmine or trying to pry his feet from out of a puddle of quicksand as he moves — although that’s likely also to do with Roy’s warped perception of things. 

“It’s your textbook,” he rasps. “Hope you don’t — mind, I took it.”

Roy frowns at that. “I don’t… Thank you. You didn’t have to — do all of this.” 

Ed shows something like a smile to the floor, but it dies out before he can grasp its subtext.

He notices the uncomfortable signs of someone who’s seconds away from telling you they don’t want to go out anymore. See each other. Be involved in any capacity. 

It’s always easier theorized than done. 

He thinks it’s also safe to say that Ed’s never been in a situation like this before, which doesn’t help either of them. 

“Your uh, your…” He motions back.

“Aunt.”

“Yeah. Sh-she said you haven’t been feeling well. Are you, are you sick?” He licks his lips, still not prying his eyes off the ground as he mouths that redundant question — the likes of which you only use when trying to fill a potentially suffocating type of silence. Shit. 

“Yeah,” Roy answers while picking at a loose thread from around the ankle of his jeans, curling his knees closer to his chest. “I think it’s the flu.” 

Ed nods. 

Roy clears his throat, thinking now or never. 

He scoots over and glances at the space beside him. Perhaps, if anything, he can at the very least help Edward navigate through his intentions in a way that leaves as little hurt feelings as possible. He owes him that much. 

Ed looks at the bed and blinks a couple of times as if computing the offer made before he starts making his way over. 

He’s walking weird. 

Not a limp exactly, more like an air of generalized drowsiness he hadn’t ever noticed on him before. 

He arrives to sit at the very edge with both feet firmly planted on the ground as if ready to bolt at any second. He doesn’t look at Roy. Up this close, he seems shaky.

“Listen,” Roy begins, because this was all his wrongdoing. As soon as the word leaves his lips he can practically feel Ed’s spine tense. Roy takes a shallow breath in.

“I’m really sorry about — about Saturday. How things went down. I didn’t mean to make you feel — pressured — or anything of the sort, really.” 

He awaits a terrible reaction but holds on to hope because at the core of his concern is the possibility that he in fact does have _his_ hands, _his_ canny smile, his same unyielding tendencies to fuck everything over. The memory of a name, a name along with a face — it gains a suffocated shiver from him. 

He breathes in to drive the point home, enlisting the urgent help from whatever long-lost sense of eloquence might still be within grasp. “I understand I crossed a line and that it’s pretty unforgivable. Just know that I seriously never wanted to make you feel uncomfortable, and —” He licks his lips. “And I’ve, I’ve really enjoyed getting to know you better. I’m… Really sorry I betrayed your trust like that.” He grandly concludes in a withering voice; his stupid heart thumping on his stupid sleeve. 

Well, it shouldn’t be. This barely lasted a couple of weeks, and it was fun, sure, but he shouldn’t go blowing any of it out of proportion just because he’s going through a rough patch. 

Rather, he should focus on breathing steadily to get his ribs to stop contracting around his cardiovascular system. 

The silence is awfully off-putting, because by all means Edward should’ve pounced on the opportunity to give his own closing statement and run the hell out of here a free person already, yet he remains completely still and silent, as if not having heard him at all. 

Roy eventually forces himself to look at him and indulgently takes a moment to slide his gaze over that fine profile; his nose, his lips, his chin — then tears his betraying eyes off seconds before Edward speaks up on an unsteady intake of air. 

Sitting on his face is a frown stitched with a mixture of — what, sadness? Confusion is definitely a part of it. 

“Yeah I’m —” Ed whispers before clearing his throat, maybe aiming for a more resolute tone. “I’ve liked getting to know you, too…” he concludes with a hardening grip of the books in his arms, his left hand absentmindedly scratching at his right elbow. And there it is. 

Perhaps a little dramatic for two obtuse high school seniors, but it’s over and done with. 

Roy nods in understanding before looking down at how he’s crossed his legs on a pretzel. He doesn’t remember doing that, but is grateful for the grounding sensation amid the growing turmoil of dread that’s gripping his chest. 

Suddenly the mattress shifts, but instead of inflating around lost weight, it balances Ed’s changed position. Roy tentatively looks up again to see he’s turned to face him, eyes still nonplussed. 

“Just —” He opens his mouth a couple of times before uttering, “You feel — _bad_ , about the Carnival?” He frowns. Roy lets his gaze wander around the room before settling on Ed again — he looks positively exhausted.

“Yes?” Roy drawls. 

“But.” He pauses while looking down at his knees. “But you didn’t, like. _Do_ anything.”

It’s from up this close that he can see the slight pull of his lower lip, a movement so slight it barely qualifies as a tick. Gone in a flash. His eyes are underlined in blue, fatigue carved deeper than usual into the soft skin under his tear ducts. The look he gives Roy is open and by all means honest, but for the second time in a day, Roy is completely fucking lost. One curveball after another is just what it takes to make him feel sort of lightheaded. 

He may also attribute that to the fact that he hasn’t been awake for longer than half an hour. 

That last uttered phrase wanders and skips and saunters through his mind without any processing. Goddamnit — is his game _off_. 

“I mean you —” Ed swallows. “It wasn’t your fault. I was really high and messed up,” he goes on, gaze diverted. “And like, all over the place I guess. My head wasn’t screwed on right, so — so I guess I probably gave you like a lotta mixed signals and that was wrong of me and I’m sorry. About that.” He shrugs, probably trying to make it seem casual. It doesn’t. 

“Sorry,” he repeats; the eye contact feels like a shove. He can swear Ed’s pupils quiver. 

Roy licks his inner cheek for a bit before answering. It tastes of overwhelming toothpaste, but also a bit like the blood gushing from his freshly stabbed, open chest is making its way up to his mouth. 

“You have nothing to apologize for,” he blinks, resolute. Bewildered. Dazed. “So, I’ll… Pretend I didn’t hear that.” His attention goes back to that loose thread he’s curling tightly around his fingers.

The silence is all-consuming until Edward cuts it with a searing knife. 

“Yeah, well. I dunno.” He sniffs. “Neither do you, so I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that, either.” 

There are only so many things that come to mind to say in response to such a phrase. 

Roy cannot compute why in the world Edward would feel guilty about it, but it’s a tad worse to imagine he’d been feeling this way for entire days without even a whiff of reassurance within reach. Not even one solitary fucking text that tried to gauge the situation — to smooth things over, to check on him. To reach out. 

Roy can’t even remember where or when he last saw his cellphone. The last time something like this happened, he found it inside a shoe tossed under his bed after an entire week. 

He takes a shaky breath in and says, “I’m still sorry.” 

He attempts a smile but it doesn’t work out, in the end. 

Ed is staring at the floor again, there’s probably some sort of code embedded in the hardwood that he ought to start trying to decipher himself. 

“So am I,” he answers. Roy can’t help the snort that elicits in him. 

“Okay,” he intones, almost as a question. 

“Okay,” Ed retorts. 

“Fine.” 

“Yeah.” 

“Good,” he pettily continues, because he knows. He knows he’s still an asshole for what went down on Saturday and he knows Ed should know, too. Yet he stubbornly doesn’t seem to understand things from the same angle, which doesn’t make it alright, either. 

Roy is an asshole. It doesn’t matter that he was high and happy — probably only makes it that much worse. 

He’s an asshole for having neglected to think — as he joyously went about peeling Ed’s clothing away, layer by painstaking, orchestrated, protective layer — that he’d still been Edward’s first kiss ever. His only kiss. The only one that’d ever gotten close enough to be able to press his lips against the side of his neck and run his hands up and down his sides, even if he squirmed a little and tended to look away when he did it. 

“Great,” Ed says, finally looking at him with a wary, sideways glance, although aside from that, he remains as fixed and static as a statue despite the obvious trembling in his fingers — is he sick? Was Halcrow’s shit mixed with something? 

Roy stares at him. 

They blink at each other like a couple of slingshots, like flippers in a pinball game. They bounce erratically around a box without contrition or understanding or a single shred of consciousness about what’s just transpired within the silent stretches of this bizarre conversation. 

“Did you think I was going to stop talking to you, or something?” Roy dares ask after a couple of grating seconds. 

Perhaps he intended that to sound as a sort of joke, perhaps he didn’t. The fact is he doesn’t expect it to sting so hard when Ed’s gaze rips away from his like he’s been burned. 

His breath stops, his hands reach out despite himself — he immediately stops once he realizes what his limbs are doing.

“I mean I…” Ed all but whispers before lightly nibbling on his lower lip. Roy hates himself for being like this, for having the power to back people up against a corner with nothing but poorly placed words — “Thought you might,” he shrugs. 

Roy doesn’t get it. He doesn’t get any of this and he’s got half a mind to reach out only to shake Ed’s shoulders and beg for him to please be kidding and implore he go look in a goddamned mirror and — 

Ed looks at the books still cradled in his arms. “Guess I kinda w-wanted some closure, if that were the case.” There's a hint of a chuckle at the back of his voice, it doesn't break out. 

It’s a little too much — what this is doing to him. 

Roy feels his face heat up as his line of sight blurs. He pointedly looks away. 

This is all getting to him, isn’t it? 

Maybe today wasn’t a good day to do this — whatever the hell this is. He’d been ready for a proper breakup. As much of a breakup as it could be cataloged as, considering. But he resolutely hadn’t imagined anything in the world could hurt ten times worse than that. 

He’s pulled back to reality with Ed’s airy chuckle. “It was stupid, I’m — I’m sorry. I shouldn't’ve come here to — bother you like this. I’m sorry,” he gets up. “I’ll just leave these and — yeah.” 

He drops his carefully, lovingly, timidly crafted excuse on Roy’s bedside table and its thump feels so heavy it almost makes Roy flinch, but not before he implores himself to react and shoot his hand up, grabbing Edward’s in his own — the covered one, the painful mystery, Roy curls his fingers but that’s about as far as his current strength will take him. 

“No — hey.” It comes out a lot fainter than he wanted. “I’m glad you came,” he says, and he means it. God (if there is such a thing) knows he means it. 

Ed looks at him like he’s been tased, but Roy gently tugs him closer. He pauses in his hold for a second, swallows, and…Proceeds by taking a slow, tiny step forward. That’s something. That’s everything, perhaps. 

A dog barks in the distance, a bird chirps, a car goes by. 

Ed licks his lips and he exhales. The air that leaves him feels burdensome, like a third-year chemistry textbook ought to be. Like a sign of unintentional yielding, a white flag only brought about by absolute exhaustion. 

Roy looks up with the intention of apologizing once more, but stops himself, thinking that it’s probably not the best idea to inaugurate that quarrel again so soon. 

The ambiance quiets down. This time, it doesn’t feel oppressive. 

“Riza gave me your address, by the way,” Ed suddenly says. “Just — I’m not being a creep about it — or anything. She said it was probably okay.” 

Roy feels the beginning of a smile grow, one that he’ll probably be able to maintain for longer than a solitary second. 

“Yeah, it is.” 

“And um. Test’s on Monday,” Ed immediately offers. “Just so you know.” 

Roy looks at his hold on Ed, notes that he didn’t reciprocate the gesture —notes that this is fine, and what’s more, it’s probably for a reason, so he slowly uncurls his hand and lets go with a woeful sigh. He strains not to show how much he’s hoping Ed won’t take a step back. 

“Guess I’ll have to show up, then.”

“Hm,” Ed smiles down at him — it’s a small, fleeting thing. But what is it they say about gifts? It’s the intention that counts? Roy knows what it’s like to be all made out of aims and hopes and motives, execution dying on your tongue and the tips of your cold fingers. 

“I’ll assume you haven’t studied, as you never need to,” he jabs. 

Ed slightly frowns at him. “What? I study. It’s pretty much all I ever do.” How much that tightens Roy’s chest is probably the truthfulness behind the words. 

But Roy shakes his head. “No, you research. You look things up out of interest — things that aren’t in the syllabus.” 

Ed pauses at that and stares a little. 

Noisy dogs keep going off outside like conjoined alarms and Edward stares a little more. 

Roy gives himself enough leeway to shrug. “I do notice. Plus you’ve shared some of those things here and there. It’s not that I’m being a creep about it.” He repeats Ed’s own wording, but it's alright because see, he's got a functioning pair of ears glued to either side of his head and the time they've spent together has genuinely been enlightening. He's an asshole — yet potentially redeemable. 

Ed goes for another laugh, one that comes out clipped and wobbly, but Roy takes the liberty of jotting it down as progress and chuckles in return. His is just as weary. 

“Right,” Ed answers, golden eyes skating through Roy’s lap, where his hands now sit. 

He’s stricken with the memory of Ed telling him a little about what interests him in the fields of organic chemistry and biological engineering. He seems to be rather into the possibilities of human tissue rehabilitation, and Roy wishes it were just his faulty memory failing to provide further examples, but it’s just Edward. Edward rarely speaks of things like those, — things like his interests, thoughts and feelings and general existence — unless explicitly prompted. 

Edward stays put and quiet and glares holes into distant trees while his mind goes at a thousand miles per second. Roy only wishes he could hook him up with the magnitude of Mr. Kimblee’s confidence while keeping his mind as it is.

That would be marvelous, and the world would rejoice.

“You’re pretty bright yourself,” seems to stumble out of him. “So, y’know. You prolly don’t need to study that much either.” 

Roy falters, a breath sticks to his throat and the words stagger out of him without a single shred of repentance. 

“Can I kiss you?” 

They’re both still riding the tail end of their uncertain smiles when Roy bites down on his, the better to kill it, the better to convey utmost seriousness in his request. Perhaps it’s a wrong move, he usually does smile while asking for things of the sort, he should be looking more approachable, he should be smooth and certain, not clinging on to dear life as he practically begs for him to stay with a fractured voice. 

He objectively knows he isn’t sitting cross-legged on his bed while buck naked, but with the way Ed looks at him, it takes some convincing for his brain to feel otherwise. He doesn’t feel menaced, though, not on the other end of Edward’s open gaze. That’s important — potentially. It feels significant in some way. 

He doesn’t say a word but inches closer and closer, turning around and letting the back of his knees touch the edge of his bed again. 

He sits. 

Roy hadn’t realized just how much his urge to suddenly close the remaining distance between them — to obliterate it, seal it in an air-tight package the size of a thumb — had been an active search for body warmth as a means of comfort until his palm touched Edwards positively glaciated right cheek. 

“Jesus — you’re freezing,” he says. 

Ed very clearly did not expect for him to point that out, if the way he almost flinches out of his touch is anything to go by. 

“What?” he says, somewhat hoarsely. “No I’m not.” He sniffles. 

“You are,” Roy breathily chuckles and it’s more an admission of relief than anything else. Relief to be allowed to touch him again, to be close. “Are you cold?” 

“No, I’m. I’m fine.” He pauses on another sniff. “I am,” Ed reiterates at the look Roy gives him without taking his palm off — perhaps while also drawing a line over his cheekbone with his thumb. Absentmindedly of course. On pure muscle memory. It’s a nice thing to do. Ed has nice skin. 

He doesn’t imagine the way Ed leans back into his palm and sags a bit himself.

“Would you like something warm? There’s plenty of sweaters I can lend you,” he says, looking over at the drawers on top of which he was practically dying just a few minutes ago. He crazily wonders if Ed can tell. 

“No, no, really. That’s — I’m good, you don’t have to.” Maybe Ed would’ve mocked him for dropping the word ‘plenty’ into his phrase like a ‘puffy victorian’, as he has on previous occasions, but now he doesn’t — a clear proof of his flagrant, ongoing lie. 

“Hm. I think you should open the second drawer over there.” He cocks his head in the furniture’s direction and Ed goes bright scarlet. Perhaps Roy shouldn’t give into his whim and smile at that, for it’s still not too late for Ed to get up and leave, but a part of him genuinely can’t help it — like the reaction has been ingrained into his very genetic code, something he’s never been able to help himself from doing. 

“I’m not opening your drawers,” he answers, looking positively alarmed. 

“Why not?” Roy begins. “What do you think I keep in there?” He sees it as the open door to sexual innuendo it could’ve been, had he half the mind to try and pursue such a stupid line. 

“I dunno… Fish tank with a bunch of fire salamanders?” 

“Huh?” Roy tries keeping the smile on, but it doesn’t feel like trying so much, at least not anymore. 

Ed looks ahead in his headboard’s direction, at the side of which lay a tossed salamander plushie, sitting on his nightstand like the forgotten childhood cotton-stitched memory it is. Some burst seams. Black and yellow. He might’ve leeched most of his vital energy off of it during these past few days. Otherwise, there’s no way he’s stayed alive on nothing but pills and orange juice. 

Chris had gotten it for him at some souvenir shop after a day at the zoo. It was intended as a joke delivered along a wolfish grin — one so dark his young self couldn’t begin to grasp the nuances of it’s meaning. “ _For my little pyro,_ ” she’d cackled. He remembers how the cashier had looked at them, but he’d accepted the gift nonetheless. 

It so turned out lighting a match on a trail of alcohol to get his estranged, grieving mother’s attention wasn’t the best idea. 

He’d been five, Chris didn’t blame him — she rather practiced her comical routines on his wee self. Anyhow, he took it as a housewarming gesture. It was the first item she ever bought him that wasn’t within a list of basic necessities for bringing an abandoned child up. Toothbrush. Shoes. Monthly visits to the doctor. Occasional hair-ruffling. He’d taken it as a steady sign that this was a place in which he could stay.

He smiles at it now, looking over his shoulder and cutting corners on his childhood's semi-sob story. “Oh, that,”

“‘S pretty cute,” Ed mutters, absently picking at his sleeve. 

“Made for the best pillow, too,” Roy says instead of ‘I’m not a fan of fire myself, but they don’t seem to mind it’. “It speaks of its resilience I suppose. Magical creatures.”

Ed snorts.

“You really are a sort of joth.”

“A — beg pardon?”

“You know. Like the intersection between a jock and a goth. You like sports and validation and shit —”

“Aha.” 

“But then you also don’t wanna miss out on the deeper meanings of life, so you like, read poetry in your spare time and wear black when you’re alone. And you say ‘beg pardon’.”

Roy shakes his head in disbelief. “You’ve ripped me open. There are no secrets from you now.” 

“Now you’re gonna have to kill me I guess,” Ed shrugs. 

“You’ll do the job yourself if you keep refusing my sweater.” 

The way Ed scrunches his nose at him is, quite possibly, all he could ever think of asking for. 

It’s for that same reason that he feels the urge to verbalize the quick swelling inside his chest with an inexplicably romantic, foolishly sentimental, disgustingly sweetened, “Plus, we can’t make this official until we’ve stolen at least one item from the other at some point. Preferably clothes.” 

He clamps his mouth shut a second too late, leaving himself at the hands of destiny and sitting still to observe the myriad of emotions that run through Ed’s eyes in a flash. 

One of said emotions, naturally, is anger. 

Or annoyance. Or a half-hearted tug aimed in that direction. 

Either way, Roy smiles. There’s nothing quite like winning a fight like this.

There’s the start of a grumble after the last shreds of surprise and tenderness fade away in wisps of honey. 

“Fine, if you really want to,” Ed practically bites as he gingerly gets up, inching his way towards the designated drawer. He pauses. “How do I know you’re not just making these things up?”

Roy’s answer sits on his tongue. Of course Ed wouldn’t know, and it certainly is a damn shame, but he won’t go forgetting about that again. It won’t slip his mind, the tenderness with which he’s being completely trusted at every single turn. _Get in my car, Ed. Make out with me in front of the entire school, Ed. Come sit right by my side. Meet me when and where I tell you. Undress._

Roy half-heartedly shrugs. “I guess you don’t.” 

Ed takes a moment, but eventually, he smiles and it stabs him in the heart. 

God, is he in a dramatic mood today.

He distantly wonders if it should prove in any way alarming that the dark cloud looming over his head quite suddenly dissipates once their semi-arguing over which sweater he can take — to which Roy says “Whichever” more than three times and Ed answers with a “Yeah but be specific” and Roy says “The one you like the most” and Ed says “Fucking tell me which one” and Roy flashes him with a grin and answers “The burgundy one, that way we can match” and Ed mimics retching all over his clothes — is over, and Ed slowly makes his way back towards him in a _dark blue_ sweatshirt that’s adorably oversized, gingerly climbing in by his side once he extends his arm as an invitation. 

The way the bed dips under his weight, the way the side of his head lays over the crook of Roy’s elbow. 

It’s all that occupies his mind at the moment, it sits on an elongated plush chair by a massive, crackling fireplace; it kicks its feet up on a table. Lingers in his brain. Settles seamlessly, just like Ed’s partial weight on him. 

He feels well at the moment. It shouldn’t be this easy. It usually isn’t. It usually takes days and days to scrape the sickness off his skin and get back to a semblance of functionality.

It takes days for him to gather the moral fortitude with which to approach coach Armstrong about his prolonged absences and confess to him, again, about the trials of an ongoing neuro-deficiency. 

This time he’s made it with a single touch, with the sight of Ed looking at him as if searching for something. Whatever it is he’s looking for, Roy feels ready to say he’ll give.

It’s only when Ed’s staring borders on intense that Roy smiles and asks him, “What?” 

Ed is silent for an elongated moment. The window’s frame is reflected on his irises, his growing pupils. It swims around like a surrealist painting, folded at the edges of his round eyes. He tentatively opens his mouth and says, 

“Nothing.” 

Roy breathes with certain ease, his fingers trail along the edge of his jaw, like outlining a specter. It feels a lot like chasing after him in that mirror maze they ran into during their high, tripping over themselves with the purpose of getting lost, getting separated, calling out for each other under fluorescent lights. He saw Edward — pieces of him fragmented by endless tunnels of reflecting glass. Yellow, red, black. A hand, a heel, a running snicker. 

Mirrors stained by breath and fingertips. He didn’t care if it was dirty, he pressed his lips against every flash of him that he managed to see, saying “Gotcha,” to nothing but empty air. 

Ed blinks at him, visibly tired and still a bit on edge, but he’s here now. Really here. He isn’t dreaming and he knows this because nothing but continuous emptiness comes to him when in this state of mind. 

After light banter and conversation arises again, Roy asks what he’d gotten up to during these past few days.

Ed settles further atop his arm and slightly curls into himself, relaxing into the embrace after a few seconds. Roy looks at the way he’s rolled the sleeves up to his wrists, and decides to file his question about what happened to the two fingers on his left hand that are wrapped in band-aids for another time. 

He’s quiet for another second and finally says, “Nothing much,”.

Roy leaves it at that and gently presses their mouths together when Ed looks at him again, leaning back to give Ed some leeway, either for him to continue the kiss or pull away. He wouldn’t blame him. It’s at this moment, where he’s at his most disgusting and pitiable, that it’s a miracle Ed’s even thought of indulging him so far. Someone should give him a medal. 

Roy settles for combing his fingers through his hair, not expecting for him to lean forwards after a second and resume their kiss with enthusiasm, but certainly not complaining about it when he does. 

He wordlessly thanks him for coming, knowing he’d be unable to voice his current happiness without it pathetically spilling out of him in salty tears. 

He does ask him, “Can you stay for a bit?”

Roy expects Ed to put up some kind of fight, as he usually does with the world at large. A grain of sand that fights against the whim of the waves at every single turn. Roy rather likes the thought of that. 

Perhaps it’s that they’ve both got that supposed post-Carnival flu, perhaps it’s how progressively cold it’s getting, but Ed simply shifts, albeit barely, and says, “Sure,” in a voice that sounds a little tired but spreads instant warmth. 

Says it like he means it. It definitely sparks something in him, and with that, he makes it into the shower on Saturday, then on Monday. 

He makes it from said shower to a new, clean set of clothes and proceeds to get his dysfunctional ass out of the house to be greeted by an air of finality while stepping into the sidewalk.

It’s getting as cold as if individual particles of oxygen had condensed into a humid type of ice. 

He doesn’t mind it, he practically saunters in and out of his car with the type of ease that only comes from having had an enormous weight lifted off of you, like his body had gotten so used to being pulled down by an overzealous type of gravity that now it feels as though he could fly off the ground. Like that cavity in his chest that’d been stuffed with rusty copper suddenly understands what true luster actually feels like. 

Particularly, the second in which his and Ed’s eyes meet across the main hallway when he walks in. 

He’s not hallucinating, the way he can feel himself float in his direction is grounded and undeniably real once he greets Ed with a wandering kiss that presses him up against a locker — but gently, with a hand strategically placed on the back of his head, the better for him not to hurt himself on the hard surface. Ed breaks the kiss and asks, “What the fuck?” along a smile that’s clearly growing despite itself. 

They’d been practically texting all weekend, somehow managing to discuss everything and nothing and all that lies in between for two days straight before meeting again. Roy knows talking to someone like this while stirring a pan or opening the fridge or walking up and down the stairs has got its unique dose of charm, but nothing compares to that first actual contact after so long of hiding within the confines of digital communication. 

“That was for nothing,” Roy answers, heart stuttering at the way Ed quickly brings his sleeve up to outline the edge of his lower lip, as if wordlessly marking the passage of Roy’s mouth. “So watch out.”

Edward makes a face at him before the bell rings, and that’s possibly all it takes for the rest of the week to pass by like a gentle breeze. 

As far as overstatements go, this isn’t much of one. 

He trots from one class to the other. He barely gets enough sleep — and it doesn’t hurt him like other times. He smiles at the ceiling when the lights are out. 

They sit closer to each other in Social Studies because Roy quickly gets into the habit of doodling Mr. Kimblee as a machine-gun ultra-nationalist impresario that smokes fat cigars and wears ridiculously detailed white leather boots. He folds his notebook paper masterpieces into small triangles to be sent out on stealth missions through one or two middle hands that make sure it reaches Edward with a discreet shoulder tap. 

Roy bites his lip to suppress an anticipatory smile as he watches Ed unfold it in his lap below the desk and immediately cover his mouth, stifling a snort or faking a heady cough. 

Sometimes he draws him hiding under his desk as the ghost of communism haunts the classroom — a red hammer and sickle with arms and legs, holding a bloody knife and seeking its prey as Kimblee practically shits his pants.

He revels in the way Ed’s entire torso goes taut with his attempt to not cackle out loud. 

He sometimes looks over his shoulder with his lips tucked into his mouth, he clenches his eyes shut or mouths a silent ‘What the actual fuck’ at him while Roy feigns bewildered ignorance. He shrugs, arches his eyebrows in alleged innocence, mouths back ‘What?’ and thinks about how he’s never felt more comfortable while slumping on a splintered wooden bench, drowning in the stagnant afternoon air of third period’s usual platitudes. 

They eat together. They talk of all types of nonsense. When they don’t have concurring classes, they hang out after school and keep said nonsense going for as far as Edward’s packed schedule will allow it to. 

When practice is out, Roy drives him to the bookstore. At times it’s so empty he lingers for long enough to become an actual nuisance. Ed shows him how they organize the bar-codes and the cash register’s broken lever, as well as the little towers made of pennies he and his co-worker Sheska confect out of sheer boredom. Neither of them have managed to stack more than a single dollar’s worth of coins before they topple over. 

Roy leans over the counter and blabbers about what little things he remembers on dictatorship propaganda from his history class, Ed laughs at him for going on a rant about how _the popular masses_ were viewed as multicellular organisms by some historians while chewing on a heart-shaped lollipop. 

“Would you be grossed out by sharing this or is it too soon in the relationship?” He asks him, contemplating the artificial red little heart. 

Ed smirks and says, “I thought you were the fuckin’ expert.” Roy bites his tongue on a ‘ _No matter, I have other ways of making you also taste like cherry_ ’.

When Roy has practice during class hours and they make them run around school grounds in pointless, deformed circles, he purposefully scampers past Ed’s calculus class and taps the window to see him go a shade of vermillion as he proceeds to do the absolute most annoying thing he can possibly think of, pressing his lips against the glass — if only to gauge how hard a retaliation-punch it’ll earn him when they meet later on. He finishes the rest of his laps while looking forward to it, chest tightened with excitement. No, he doesn’t care who was looking, because eventually, he can curl his fingers over the shell of Ed’s ear while moving a strand of hair away from his eyes and he won’t squirm away after a few seconds. He won’t look as bewildered at the touch, as if he’s come to the same, tacit understanding Roy has.

Maybe he’ll express how utterly disgusting a gesture that is, sure, but pointedly allow for it to continue after Roy offers a most disingenuous kind of apology.

When this first week is over and Chris asks him about Ed, Roy throws the term ‘boyfriend’ over his shoulder like the afterthought that it is. What really matters is the growing magnetism he’s always felt towards him, not seeming like it’s decreasing in intensity one single bit just because they’re actually together now. 

What matters is that the closer he gets, the more it feels like he’s staring into a fascinating black hole he can’t wait to throw himself into. It’s filled with dying stars and bustling constellations. Waiting.

What matters is the absolute safety of knowing the attraction wasn’t particularly sexual at any point, as well as how it needn’t be, from this point onwards. What matters is it’s fine if he doesn’t push himself. 

He lets himself loop his arm around Ed’s waist and kiss him behind some rusty bleachers, even if it’s too cliche for either of them to handle. It’s alright. There’s no rehearsal to it, there’s no ulterior motive to his practiced dallying, his instinctively coy smile. He feels part of his fabricated persona chip away every single time Ed laughs at something he didn’t particularly intend to be funny. All measure of practiced charisma seems to have no effect. 

Intertwining their fingers as they walk is allegedly abominable, but it’s only done out of genuine want. He feels the all-consuming urge to ambush Ed off the ground in order to get a sense of his actual weight and only stops himself at the knowledge that that would most likely be the last thing he ever did before Ed kicked him so hard the lights went out. 

It’s still a payoff worth considering, but it’s certainly not a play. 

Roy feels the urge for closeness like an itch in his bones, bursting out of him to his cardiac rhythm, yet he mostly keeps his hands off of Ed’s painfully explored, yet thankfully established boundaries. 

It doesn’t escape him that the tightness with which Edward crosses his arms over his chest or stomach is charged with meaning. 

That the alertness with which he walks and eats and speaks is a habit categorically born out of violence. Roy knows this better than Ed would think. 

He doesn’t tell him that he knows. 

He leaves it be. 

If Edward is going to flounder with the way he lowers a hand to his hip, then he simply abstains from doing so. He finds that, after just a few seconds of caressing his cheek or playfully tugging at his hair or getting to hold him close as they sit next to each other in the basketball court’s creaking benches, he doesn’t really need it. 

Looking into his eyes when they go off on a tangent filled with nothing but idleness and distraction, Roy thinks he begins to catch on to the first few fragments of what’s always composed the basic elements to this type of infatuation. 

Being paid so much undivided attention to by none other than Edward Elric is a dizzying event and Roy doesn’t care if it ends up spinning his head clean off. His lips are soft and wandering, his laugh is clipped and sardonic, his gaze is both critical and vulnerable and filled with an uncut type of awe — as is Roy’s when he looks and looks and keeps on looking. 

He should be worrying about what a novel sensation it is, to let himself fall back, to let himself stop trying and just take the other person in. He should probably be slowing down, too. Not practically skipping to him every time and texting at the speed of light and letting his presence monopolize every inch of his mind. Not wanting to fall to his knees every time Ed initiates a kiss on his own accord and out of nowhere. 

He doesn’t worry. Even if it makes the mouths that surround him begin to whisper. People are bound to find themselves just as confused as he is, once they realize what a mortifying thing it is to start catching feelings — let them eat gossip magazines, says he. Even if it garners them pointed looks while walking from class to class, snickering, talking, paying no mind to the chipped wall paint or the spilt soda that decorates the halls. 

Most guys make a point out of tackling him harder than usual during practice — he smiles back while accepting their hypocritical hands to stand. They’ll always be too afraid to actually slur him out. There’s nothing more vicious to some of these law-abiding Christians than the openness with which he exists and shows affection. Ed still has his qualms about being so public, it’s clear to see, but Roy couldn’t be paid to give one solitary shit. He holds his hand and kisses his cheek.

Even if it gathers some inevitable attention that eventually leads him to not-so-casually bump into Mr. Hughes on a fateful Thursday morning while turning a corner to make it to history, where the eternal repetition of prideful deceit and institutionalized bloodlust will be further discussed and organized into a few essays, due before the end of the term. 

“Roy Mustang!” he chirps and smiles and glimmers behind two rectangles of reflecting glass. “You’re exactly the man I wanted to see,” he punctuates with a snap, which is just crossing the border between enthusiastic and overzealous, but Roy can’t really complain much more than what a forced smile and a tamely vexed look get him. This _was_ his homeroom teacher about three years ago, and he’s always thought himself to be friends with every student. There’s no real reason for him to shatter the illusion, not even as he’s unsubtly coaxed into his office and made to sit through at the very least five straight minutes of apparently harmless small talk. 

Not even when Mr. Hughes leans against the edge of his desk instead of on the other side of it, standing a bit too close and suddenly leveling a gaze at Roy that lets a jagged end of stark green authority finally shine through. 

Roy shifts in his seat, clearing his throat with some flimsy excuse about Mr. Grumman’s dislike for tardiness. 

Mr. Hughes offers him a wan smile and the air tenses before he deigns it appropriate to speak up again. Namely, after a little more pointless ominousness has been floating around the unspoken reason for his summoning. 

“So I couldn’t help but notice,” he begins without losing an ounce of pep. “That you and Edward have been getting pretty close as of late.”

Roy swallows again because the prickling annoyance that’s immediately triggered gets a strong whiff of defensiveness and that alone is a molotov cocktail unsuited for small, indoor spaces. 

“Yes?” he says, returning every shred of eye contact. 

Mr. Hughes’ smile doesn’t lose resoluteness, but rather morphs with some kind of unnamable motivation — like hinting at a backdrop made of years of experience dealing with tough teenagers, years of putting two and two together to get an invariably nasty and unfortunate — yet usually predictable —bigger picture. 

He gives a clipped sigh on gently pursed lips before saying, “He’s quite a bright person. Very nice to spend time with, isn’t he? I wouldn’t use the word amenable,” he chuckles. “Wouldn’t go as far, no. But he’s a great kid, underneath all the lip.”

“I don’t really mind that part,” Roy informs him with a little smile, fingers intertwined and elbows propped on the armrests. He doesn’t like where this is going, and he’s got full intentions to be vocal about it. 

“I’m sure you don’t,” Hughes warmly answers, avoiding his double entendre. “Overall, he makes for great company, what do you think?”

Roy blinks at him. “He does.” 

Mr. Hughes nods. “And he’s nice to talk to, yes? Empathetic, insightful, really rather intelligent. Maybe frighteningly so at times,” he laughs again. 

Roy feels the corners of his mouth begin to strain as he takes a steady breath in, nods once and answers, “Yes.” In a tone that drips the well-eared sardonicism of ‘ _That is part of why I am fucking dating him_ ’. 

This is where Hughes’s smile shows teeth for the first time. 

“Listen, I know this must probably be pretty amusing to you, but Ed’s a, well… How to put it,” he briefly looks away with a small, analytical frown playing on his features until the term appears and his gaze lights up. “Ah, he hasn’t exactly had what you’d call an easy life,” he says, delivering his last words with a slight swaying of his stance, as if to mark his words around the movement. 

“You kids have probably heard all about it. The grapevine is a cruel, cruel thing.” The way the man keeps babbling like the familiar, exceedingly charismatic host to a late afternoon radio talk show while his implications grow in both tone and intensity, makes Roy’s task to keep a neutral face on all the more excruciating. He finds it rather annoying when people don’t care to modulate their appearance in accordance with the gravity of the things they say. 

His fingers tense, but he reminds himself not to clench his jaw. Mr. Hughes is the kind of man to sport the smile of practiced, baby-like innocence like he was born to do it in the face of other people’s rightful anger. 

“Anyway. It’s like I’ve said,” he shrugs. “Ed’s a good kid. Gentle. Kind.” The last word is delivered with a hand gesture that could be seen as mediating, the trained body language of a part-time therapist, yet it only reads to Roy as a sort of pointed sort of warning. His eyes start burning into him. “He minds his own business, for the most part, right?” He poses rhetorically. “He’d never willingly hurt anyone, or get in other people’s way. Like you, he’s just trying to make it to graduation.” 

This definitely didn’t go in the sexually-puritan judgement direction he’d half-expected it to, but it might be a couple of levels worse. 

“Right,” he limits himself to utter, trying to force some bluntness out of the man by pulling on a tense rope. 

Mr. Hughes returns to a tamer smile. “Roy,” he intones, looking at him from above his glasses as light catches onto their edge.“High school is over for you in less than two months,” he informs. “You have a pristine track record so far, grades and extracurriculars all paving the way for a bright future.” Roy knows he’s letting himself frown. “What I’m getting at is I sure wouldn’t want to hinder your life by adding a disciplinary flagging to this golden file o’ yours, but I sure as hell won’t stop myself if this is your idea of what a healthy prank is.”

Roy feels like his cheek is being pinched. His hair annoyingly pulled. He manages to take another breath after a few silent seconds, letting his lips slightly part.

“Prank, sir?” he says, conceding rather than imploding. Hughes hums in agreement. 

Slack jaw, Mustang, relax your shoulders. Think about the absurdity of this whole interaction. He systematizes. He strains to get the pieces of information to align themselves into some coherence and achieves this after a few more moments of silence, only to realize how much it stings. The myriad of implications that are thrown into his lap like a block of concrete, breaking his legs. 

Hughes doesn’t wait on him, he delivers judgment without contrition. “I’d say it’s especially cold-blooded to go after someone who’s already been hurt — plenty more than you or even I know, so do let that sink in.” 

That’s a fairly brutal thing to say, of course, but what’s he leaving out? Pointed terms — inflicted, purposeful, harsh, wicked — that scream out in every silent pause.Roy struggles to find his footing, to find his breath, yet eventually forces himself to do both in one go and speak without wobbling.

“I’m sorry,” he says, shifting in his seat. “Maybe I’m not getting the copious amount of subtext, here, but I fail to see how any of these facts lead to our relationship.” He knows it’s as good as a dare, he knows his smart mouth isn’t pushing so much as downright shoving, but Mr. Hughes doesn’t bite. 

“Do you?” The man before him muses, arched eyebrows and everything. Well, let it not be said he doesn’t know about gesticulation, it just won’t do the trick this time. What, is he supposed to come clean about some heinous plot to ruin everything? Billy Nolan style? Is he meant to, what, confess to some inherent type of malice? To say that he hates dogs, too? That he dissolves snails on grainy salt in his free time and thinks handicapped people deserve the hardship? That he laughs maniacally behind closed doors whilst devising his plans to tip the world’s balance over towards pure evil? 

Ed is fascinating in ways other people have very clearly never cared to ponder, but what of it? It’s obviously their fucking loss. 

Looking at Hughes’s expression, he finds no genuine appreciation for what Edward might be as something more than a pitied victim. Something more than a collection of tragic events. Something more than accumulated pain. 

Roy feels his pulse thump along his veins, fattening them with warming anger as he gets up in a single stride. Of _course_ it had never crossed his mind to think that it could all be misinterpreted like this. Scrutinized and twisted into such a horrifying thing — modified to unrecognizable extents. 

“I don’t know, sir,” he says while flinging his backpack over his shoulder. “Sounds to me like something you should discuss with Ed, see what his opinion is.” 

Mr. Hughes tilts his head, he says, “I will, thank you,” but Roy doesn’t grace him with another second before turning on his heel. 

It’s when he’s opened the door and placed a foot outside that Hughes calls out to him one last time. He stops in his tracks because impoliteness has never been a part of his trade, and pissing off a faculty member is also bound to go down in the books. Consequently, having such a thing happen right before he gets his diploma is sure to make one Chris Mustang a thoroughly unhappy woman. He’d rather save that brand of suffering for the most hypothetical streaks of his imagination. 

“I’ll be seeing you, Roy!” he sing-songs. 

Roy draws a breath in, holds it, and turns around to close the door behind. Smiling, nodding, whatever it takes. 

He nearly trips on himself as he makes his way further out into the hall. He backtracks towards a water fountain. Drinks his weight in lukewarm H2O of dubious precedence. He swallows a scream, he keeps walking. 

“I think Mr. Hughes wants me to break up with you,” he says after spotting Ed in the distance and practically running to his side, slumping against the aluminum box next to him as he wipes the remaining moisture from his mouth on the crook of his elbow. 

“Oh yeah?” Ed answers, not paying any mind to the way in which he’s practically panting. His vision swims in and out of focus for a terrifying second before he fixates on the way Ed’s apparently organizing the contents of his locker, slipping one notebook after another from his arms and into the constructed space, taking out some useless pieces of paper while he’s at it. 

“Yeah.” Roy huffs a prolonged breath out while giving himself a moment to further lean back against whatever anonymous lottery winner owns the locker right next to Ed’s. “I never thought much about the man, he seemed nice enough when he told me I should get into the theatrical acting business when I was a freshman.”

Ed pauses for long enough to give him a pointed look before taking his AP special edition biology textbook and placing it inside with a few pushes. “ _Joth_ ,” he says.

“I mean The Merchant of Venice is too quotable for its own good; it’s not really something that refers to my particular talent,” Roy answers. “Anyway. I suppose I underestimated the extent of his, erm, inquisitive nature.” Perhaps it shouldn’t be so, but the annoyance and fuming anger he felt minutes ago suddenly feels awfully out of reach. 

His heart feels like it’s beating out of his ribcage, he wants to crush a juicebox in one hand, to bite his lip off — or to bite Ed’s nose only to get shoved back and _feel_ something with inescapable clarity. He settled for popping the knuckles on his left hand, then right, then back to the left in case he missed any.

Ed shifts his attention back to excavating crushed pieces of paper out from between some of his stacked books, not looking in the least bit alarmed. Roy has half a mind to reiterate his opening sentence in case he completely missed it by ignoring Roy when Ed finally reacts. 

He shrugs while distantly inspecting one bunch in particular. “Probably thinks you’re hanging out with me as like a joke or something,” he mutters, giving it a go-over. He decides it’s trash and tosses it along the small cluster of banished notes that are about to meet the inside of a recycling bin in a few minutes. 

It’s probably as cold and unfeeling as the sentiment that momentarily overtakes him. Roy falters as he grips his index with the other hand, tugging. 

“What?” There’s the intent of a laugh in his tone, somewhere, but it doesn’t quite make it out. It doesn’t help that Ed doesn’t even turn to look at him in favor of scrutinizing his locker’s organization and thus doesn’t get to see Roy’s initial perplexity. 

It bleeds into a coiling pressure in his chest fairly soon as the words thread themselves into an ugly composition. An ugly thing. A thing that he can’t even bring himself to name, a thing he’d rather spend the rest of his life not thinking about. A thing that makes his very bone-marrow start to crawl. He might need to get that checked out. 

“Ed.” 

“Hm.”

Roy blinks. 

“What do you mean 'as a joke'?” 

“Just that…,” He trails off, not gracing him with as much as a sideways glance which is — maddening, might be a way to put it mildly. “I dunno.” 

“Ed,” Roy silently urges him to look. He summons the help of telepathy or at the very least invisible gamma rays. No dice. “Ed, what the hell do you mean ‘hanging out’?” 

Ed takes another notebook and throws it inside with a half-hearted groan.

“ _Just_ — okay.” Roy wants to seize the pause to explode in frustration, but Ed beats him to it with a sharp sigh, finally turning to face him. “Like, okay. You know the seventies version of Carrie?”

“Oh, fucking hell…” Roy can’t look, he can’t even bring himself to stand up straight and rather goes for rolling onto the opposite side.

“Hey — no, no, like I’m just saying. Right? Counselors usually take that shit as a prime example of like — accostment amongst the youth — and — fuck, I don’t know,” he says, shoving another hard-cover book into his assigned metal box, making it echo through the force of the motion. “Tampon safety.” He gestures vaguely with one hand. “Coming of age as a young woman through assorted menstrual allegories.”

“Yeah, I got that the first time a maths sub teacher gave it a spin on the DVD player.” Roy clips. “ _Hanging out_ …” Saunters out of his mouth, all bitter amusement. 

“ _Fine_ , fuckin’. Dating. Or whatever.” While his tone alone points towards an eye roll, his uneasy stance is all raw nerves. 

Roy would be tempted to feel bad were it not for one, extremely cute, and also impossible for in this enhanced type of headspace he’s in. He feels equal parts extremely frustrated and acutely attracted to Ed’s level of accidental adorableness — Hughes’ little talk suddenly exiled to the outer rings of his perception. 

Was the water fountain spiked with something? 

“I’m just saying that’s probably his reasoning, alright?” Ed goes on. “Look, I — I sit with the guy for forty minutes three times a week, I should know how the counselor-brain works.” 

“You do?” Roy wavers. The fact that he didn’t know this isn’t surprising. They haven’t exactly been playing trivia on the other’s personal life during their time together, and this might as well count as a properly intimate detail. 

He internally winces while attempting to quantify his recent rudeness towards the man. Yes, he might’ve acted a lot differently had he known that that was the green-eyed sugar-rush of a person that listens to Ed a few times a week. 

That he provides a safe space for Ed and dedicates a meaningful amount of time to hear him out. As per his actual job description. 

“Yeah, I mean. It’s whatever.” Ed says. “We mostly talk about college prospects and shit.”

It probably is anything but ‘whatever’. He doesn’t pick at it. 

“I didn’t know that,” he simply reiterates. 

“Yup.” 

Roy wants to say sorry, but he doesn’t grasp what for. 

Backtracking a few steps, Mr. Hughes’ words read as annoyingly paternal — as a father standing on his porch with a loaded rifle on their offspring’s first date. 

Something about that, despite annoying, makes him swell with a certain kind of relief he can’t quite place — but he also can’t stay mad. 

“What?” Ed asks after a flickering gaze. It’s at this point that he realizes he was staring. 

“Well,” he lets a somewhat strained breath go. “You know what this means.”

Edward blinks. “I — do?”

“Apparently, I haven’t been diligent enough in giving you — and the entire world — solid proof of my undying affection.” 

“What,” Ed all but deadpans. 

“I think we have to go back to basics here. I’m thinking, taking you on a very public, very cheesy, prolonged date—”

“No.”

“ —in a classic-styled diner,” 

“A — what? No,” Ed shuts his locker with a pointed shove. “ _No_.” It’s too late, individual pieces of painfully traditional romantic information start coming together to form a perfect type of picture and Ed makes this all too easy, what with his loveable frown and that particular brand of defensive embarrassment that he can only ever feel adoration for.

“Yes, the one that hasn’t had its wallpaper changed since the fifties, that’s enough to give us that feel-good, old-school vibe on the mechanics of heteronormative dating, even if there’s a mold problem growing on th—”

“Fuck off, Mustang,” he says while stomping off. 

“What? I’m only saying, I could pick you up at six,” Roy counters while falling into a parallel pace next to him. 

“Or you could not.”

“I could play the radio instead of an aux cord and personally hand-feed you french fries that’ve been previously dipped in a chocolate milkshake.”

“You’re trying to make me sick. I get it,” he says while batting a hand. “You wanna get rid of my existence and the only way you can think of is making me fucking puke all of my guts out until there are no vital organs left inside.” 

“Look me in the eye,” Roy says, “and tell me you don’t like mixing french fries with any ice-cream product.”

Edward does turn to him, but glares. 

Roy smiles. “Oh — hey, we could get a sundae with a cherry on top and two spoons.”

There seems to be a tipping point. “Who fuckin’ hurt you?”

“Oh, alright, alright. I get it — two sundaes, _one_ spoon,” he offers. “That way we’ll have to fight each other for dominance over that single utensil. You know — homoerotically.” He keeps a straight face. 

Ed makes a sound like something just died at the base of his throat. 

Roy offers to carry the last two notebooks he kept with him, to throw away his trash. 

He smiles through the day, he smiles through the evening while picking at his dinner in front of a _very_ amused Chris.

They don’t end up going through with an idealized milkshake-wellness type of rendezvous, but it’s alright because he also finds himself smiling like an idiot as they make a day out of going to the dime store to purchase their combined weight in assorted candy.

Ed hasn’t gotten tired of him, or at least finds his antics marginally more tolerable, if his continued presence is anything to go by. 

He elbows him out of the register’s way to pay for everything himself with a type of force an earlier version of him would have been too afraid and insecure to enact. But this Ed swears at him with vigor as he takes two twenties out of his pocket and all but slams them on the counter while the clerk packs their sucrose into a green plastic bag with an unamused look on his face. 

Roy lifts his hands in absolute surrender and laughter spills out of him without contrition.

They walk back to Roy’s place, and he gets Ed to join him in his ongoing never-step-on-a-line-or-crack-on-the-floor campaign, which is made a little challenging by the way they’ve looped their arms around each other. It’s a Saturday. 

November has finally settled in and all the trees are bare. The sky is always a continuous stretch of grey and Roy thinks, as he swings a bag filled with Baby Ruths and Three Musketeers and Hersheys; SweeTarts; cherry gum; Sour Patch Kids, that he’s never felt lighter.

They sit cross-legged on the floor in his room and Ed throws M&M’s into his mouth, missing at times but mostly getting it right — too right. One of those chocolate beads from hell decides to skip the whole mastication deal and dives straight for his tonsils. The choking is immediate and possibly made a handful of times worse by the deranged laughter that accompanies it. 

“ _Edward_ ,” he croaks while doubling over himself, not missing the golden opportunity for preposterous drama. “Please, tell Fuery I’m s-sorry I never paid back the —” He coughs. “Eleven dollars that I owe him.” 

Ed gets on his knees and crawls to round him, the better to envelop his arms around his lower ribcage as he himself shakes in mirth. Roy can feel Ed’s stuttering breath as he struggles to get a hold of himself while still chewing on a red vine strand. It pokes the back of his neck and tickles. 

“Pay him, you fucking crook!” he says around the candy while giving him a measured squeeze, eliciting another string of continued hacking. 

“Ah,” he lets himself fall flat on his back. “I see the grim reaper appear before me.”

“Idiot,” Ed punches his arm.

“No more shall I run out onto the sun-kissed fields! No fragment of life shall remain within this carcass of a body —” Another cough hijacks his frame and it’s a miracle Ed is still by his side, going through the physical motions of make-believe first aid. 

“Along the night’s thousand shadows I lay; a shadow of a man — a spirit, no more.” With that, he lets himself fall back, eyes glued to the ceiling before his lids fall closed and he solemnly proceeds to be fake-deceased. 

“I — holy shit, did you just come up with all that?”

“I think some of it is Edgar Allan Poe,” he mumbles without opening his eyes. 

“How come people don’t bully you to death,” Edward marvels, it matters not how hard Roy wants to cackle because the act must be held, like a child reveling in the confines of strict game-rules, he keeps his joy to himself. It does bloom in his chest like a golden breath, though, suspended mid-air, tainting the room under its luminescence. He distantly wonders how that’s even possible when all he sees are the back of his lids. 

Ed climbs on — straddles his waist and looms over him, watching, breathing, silently tugging Roy’s pulse out of him with every passing second. He doesn’t weigh that much at all, sitting on Roy’s lower stomach with his knees placed on either side on the ground. 

He feels two fingers press against the side of his neck. Ed lets go of a sweetened sigh. “Time of death,” he pronounces as Roy bites his inner lip. “Uh, four twenty-five.” 

The room is spinning even before he feels the air shift, like a wave sliding against the shore in slow motion. 

He dares not open his eyes, even before he feels a pair of unmistakable lips press up against his own. For a moment all he can smell is Ed, the shampoo he uses, the softener that clings to his clothes, the variance of something entirely his. It pauses the moment like a dot, an em dash, a slap to the face, only delivered by a most loving hand. 

The kiss sits on him, along with a growing pressure on his chest he knows has nothing to do with Ed’s presence. 

He barely gets a chance to respond to the chaste nature of the warm contact before it’s gone, and he slightly parts his lips to take whatever feeble little breath wants to grace him by entering such a disgustingly lovestruck mouth; one where the very spit is surely now tainted by that sickly pink of fascination. 

He cracks an eye open and smiles. “You know, that technically counts as necrophilia.” 

Ed looks down at him with both his hands placed at either side of his head and he’s reminded, with a whipping type of recollection, about that time in which he told his psychiatrist that he’d probably never not been in love with someone — anyone. 

The two girls with which he had a threesome one summer. The college guy who was just passing through town and stopped at the gas station to ask where the nearest highway exit was, the one who winked at him and floored the gas pedal after Roy’d given him a blowjob in his car. The woman in her mid-forties who gently brushed against his arm while moving past him at the supermarket’s queue — saying ‘ _Excuse me, sweetheart_ ’, smiling at him with warm crinkles in her eyes, a pencil dress, a golden bracelet under red-painted nails. He’d laid on his bed that night and touched himself, thinking of the glint he’d imagined in her eyes as she ever-so-slightly squeezed his bicep. 

And he’d fallen in love for a few hours, as with the rest. 

Maybe some of them lasted a couple of days, maybe some managed to drag the feeling into a full-grown week — then they vanished before it started over. 

If his breath catches, Ed doesn’t comment on it, instead he rolls his eyes. 

“Do you _have_ to say dumb shit every five minutes?” he complains, "Is it like this non-disclosed contract you have with some witch?" In response to which Roy proceeds to mimic his mouth being zipped shut, flicking away an imaginary key. Ed breaks into a grin. “Excellent,” he says before leaning down to kiss him again. 

Roy lets his eyes fall shut and waits for that soft mouth that tastes of red vines — which are, incidentally, his favorite. 

He lifts a hand and lets his fingers trace the side of his shoulder, moving on through his clothed collarbone and sliding up his neck until he feels his fingers entangle in a thread of soft hair. 

He can feel Ed’s goosebumps break under his fingertips as their conjoined breaths grow heavier by the second. Ed presses against his sides with both his thighs, perhaps in an absentminded move to close his tensing legs. 

Roy gently moans into his mouth and he answers by slightly shivering. It’s at this point, perhaps, that he gains awareness of the hardness between his legs, attached to the fact that Ed’s sudden movements are a clear response to that. 

Ed breaks the kiss with a wet, tiny gasp — barely noticeable if it weren’t for their closeness — and pushes himself upright. 

Roy blinks up at him as he catches his breath. 

“Um,” Ed looks down, as if signaling. The creeping blush on his neck and cheeks hasn’t been a good sign, so far, not under this type of context. It probably doesn’t help that he’s literally feeling Roy’s unintentionalerection press up against his ass. 

“Sorry,” Roy immediately offers. The way Ed’s body was practically rubbing up against his own while kissing couldn’t have expected any different results, but he’s not about to let himself utter something as stupid, useless and indecorous. Much like his entire being at this very moment. “I’m —” He pauses on a breathy chuckle. “I’m sorry,” Roy marvelously repeats. 

Ed shakes his head with some haste as he swallows. “No, no.” He offers a low, sheepish laugh of his own, a breath probably meant to brush it off even with the sharp uncertainty that suddenly overtakes his posture. “‘S fine.” 

Roy half expects things to take a sobering turn from here on out. It’s become rather clear that Ed doesn’t have a taste for the carnal, so much so that he’d be lying if he said asexuality hadn’t crossed his mind whilst wondering about his reticence to this sort of contact. 

On the other hand, Roy’s less than charming approaches have probably sealed the deal for his distaste. It’s hard to imagine anyone would want to get intimate with him after nothing but a few brutish touches and a Carnival parking lot fiasco. 

He has half a mind to squirm out from under Ed’s weight — to excuse himself, make a run for it and lock himself in the bathroom until his body, who apparently thinks it belongs to a twelve year old who’s just seen a nipple online for the first time ever, calms the hell down — when he suddenly bends back down to kiss him again. 

Roy freezes, but not entirely out of shock. 

Granted, he didn’t expect the contact to resume so casually after a pause like that, but what to make of the way Ed’s teeth accidentally graze against his lip? Is it even fair to catalogue it as unintended, anymore? Their coupling is by no means seasoned, but Roy dares to recognize that Ed’s gotten quite proficient at the whole kissing ordeal — it does wonders for someone to not be disintegrating in gross social anxiety and bending under mind-breaking, drug-induced fear. 

Fuck. He can barely concentrate after Ed’s warm tongue peeks inside his mouth. 

He doesn’t stop and neither does Roy, who takes the liberty of giving into his basest instincts and brings a caressing palm up to either side of the small of Ed’s back, slightly squeezing in a way he hopes is reassuring. Ed doesn’t pull away, even as Roy travels up the side of his spine with one hand and lets it curl at the base of his neck.

He assumes his obvious arousal isn’t being viewed as a problem at the moment, at least not if the way Edward’s hand suddenly travels down to his fly and tentatively palms the bulge in his jeans is anything to go by. 

His breath sutters on Ed’s mouth as his eyes fly open in something like bewildered amazement. 

Here is definitely something he hadn’t trained himself to expect, as he maybe would have with any other type of relationship. 

Ed slightly pushes himself up on his right hand, leaving but a few inches of heady breathing to stand between their blushing faces and wet lips.

“Is — is this,” he starts, almost whispering. “Um — okay?” 

Roy blinks at him, pulse deranged and completely uncharted. He barely stops himself from rubbing his pelvis up into his hand by the grace of a mere splinter of self-control and barely-salvaged dignity. 

His voice has decided to take a short vacation out in the Bahamas, so any form of verbal confirmation seems to be strictly out of reach. He nods instead, kind of eagerly. 

Edward bites his lip in contemplation. God, what must he look like at the moment? It’s not enough that the contact took him completely by surprise, for destiny has also dictated that he must feel utterly debauched before he’s even been properly touched. Fuck and triple fuck. 

Once Ed starts cautiously rubbing his steady palm up and down his clothed erection he resolutely doesn’t stop, even if his expression is still transparent enough to broadcast a healthy dose of doubt and nervousness. Roy doesn’t hum out of a necessity to be reassuring, but because the sound genuinely escapes his mouth in the face of this kind of friction. 

Edward looks down at his own hand and licks his lips after a second. He doesn’t dare let himself slow down, yield, relinquish.

Roy can only feel grateful at the moment. His hands find themselves placed over Ed’s upper thighs as he tries to remember the last time someone dry-humped him — not that this can technically count as that, but the sentiment is quite similar. 

Perhaps that’s why his breathing grows uneven and his eyelids fall closed and he feels like the individual pores on his skin are being set as bonfires. 

When Ed’s mouth is back at his, he gains an understanding of yet another thing that’d escaped his awareness — having Ed be in control somehow feels better. It makes the whole ordeal a lot less daunting than what it had been in most of his silly fantasies, where he always tried his best to come up with an appropriate set and setting, mostly just to fail miserably and spiral himself back into that old pit of guilt and unsatisfied longing. This seems to be just perfect. Under his hand and rhythm, all he’s got to do is fall in line and let himself react, which also doesn’t seem to be a challenge. 

It’s made all the more alluring once he feels the hem of his jeans start tugging downwards after a while. Edward breathes raggedly against his mouth. 

“Can you — I mean —” He chuckles shakily and parts once more to properly stare him down. Normally, he’d say he isn’t a huge fan of sustained eye contact while engaging in sexual acts, but right now, Roy will gladly absorb any kind of scrutiny if it comes from the likes of such a perplexing human being.

Ed still looks rather uncertain, and seems to be speaking despite himself. “Do you, like, wanna —” 

He doesn’t have to be told twice. Roy’s fingers are at his fly in a matter of milliseconds, helping Ed’s single hand out as he undoes the button and pulls the zipper down. Is it too eager of him? He can’t seem to summon the appropriate amount of self-awareness to give a damn. 

Ed drags his attention down to his groin and scoots back a little, the room momentarily filled only by the sound of their faint shuffling and unspoken anticipation. Ed’s brow slightly furrows in something like concentration once he considers the obvious tent in his boxers. Roy can’t even bring himself to feel embarrassed about the damp spot that’s probably sitting at the tip, under his light blue underclothes, attached to the fact that little grinding from a palm’s heel is all it took to get him like this.

Can he blame it on the time stretch that’s elapsed since last he had this sort of interaction? He’d have to be greedy to think it’s been way too long since he got a hand job. 

Maybe he is. 

Maybe the least he can do is not tilt his hips up once Ed wraps his left hand around his still-clothed length and gives it something of an experimental squeeze. 

He emits a quiet moan, because everyone’s home and they didn’t think to lock the door when they came in. Not that people don’t think to knock in this household — but still. 

He closes his eyes again as his hands ball into tense, impatient fists at his sides. His brain seems to be divided between the reminder that Ed’s running the show, and that mind-melting spread of pleasure that warms his stomach every time he reaches the head of his dick through the bunched-up cotton of his boxers before sliding back down a tad. He manages not to move too much through sheer force of will, but genuinely can’t help it when his eyes fly open and he moves his head up a bit, as if to get a peak of Ed’s motions before letting it fall back against the wooden floor. 

“Is that alright?” Ed kind of whispers. It’s hard to tell what type of implication his tone is going for, especially in such a fogged-up state of mind, so Roy simply assumes it’s a sort of caution. 

He blinks up at him, sees slightly tinted lips, stained with a little red colorant and two golden orbs glimmering in concentration as he keeps his measured ministrations going — he thinks he might stop breathing. 

“Y — Mhm,” he strains. “ _Yeah,_ ” 

The friction provided by the fabric is just a few particles shy from being too much — and that’s great, too, but he distantly wonders if it’s being done like this because skin-to-skin is the real issue. 

The image of those mysterious bandaids that decorate Ed’s fingers also figures in his mind. Their edges might feel rough against him, so that could also be part of the reason he doesn’t seem to be interested in moving beyond this layer, but it’s generally quite alright by him. 

He could stare up at the nothingness of his concrete white ceiling for all of eternity if it meant laying on his back while Ed Elric randomly chose to focus on the ache between his legs. 

“Ah — j-just,” Roy lightly flinches at the sudden tightness of his hand. “It’s perfect, just, try a little lighter.” He practically pants. “Like — yes. Just — Yeah, like that,”

“Shit — sorry,” Ed curses.

Roy mindlessly shakes his head. “‘S perfect,” He repeats, finding that he quite means it despite the possibility that it sounds strictly hyperbolic. Everyone has their own style when it comes to things like these, sure, but there’s something distinctive to being turned on by the mere implication of who’s the one giving — such is the case with Ed. The mere gravitas of his presence marks the rhythm to Roy’s pulsing arousal, despite the fact that the contact is, by itself, also very rewarding. 

He only wishes it wasn’t so difficult to communicate what a good time he’s actually having, because heated seconds suddenly morph into full-grown minutes that, in turn, shift into an accumulating stretch of time that starts feeling more and more oppressive in its unspoken pressure for something else to happen — namely, for him to finish. 

Hand jobs are repetitive affairs. There’s only so much excitement that can come from them after a while, where it all but falls into a mechanical sort of loop. 

Somehow, he just knows Ed’s probably starting to note something might be off. 

He knows he’s already knee-deep inside some dense puddle of overthinking by the time a sliver of awareness comes back to him, turning all the nice sparks he was feeling into nothing more than background cardboard trees in this play of growing despair. Is it the sugar-high? 

He swallows. Ed doesn’t say a word. 

There’s no sexy way of saying ‘ _Hey, I’m taking this medicine right now that makes me calm and happy at the expense of sporadic difficulty to come — at this rate, it could take you a full-on hour to see anything mildly interesting but it has nothing to do with your amazing, perfect hand, I promise on my life it doesn’t_ ’. 

His usual Prozac dose didn’t change after that particular depressive episode Ed walked right into, but the doctor decided to up his Zoloft grammage when he called, if only just to see what happened. At least he thinks that might be it. Little sacrifices for the sake of sanity. 

Every time he feels something start to mount it rapidly dissolves, right at the edge of his perception as his body retreats back into this plateau of lukewarm, steady, unchanging pleasure. It feels like he’s pushing against a brick barrier, trying to break it by repeatedly shoving his shoulder against the wall. He tries concentrating, forcing it out even though he knows it’s not really possible — it’s not like taking a piss. Not that that comes so easy, either. Years of ingrained potty training work rather similarly to this type of completion if you hot-wire your brain hard enough, there’s an obstinate part of it that’s obsessed with protocol and proper formality. If it gets it in its — hah — head that nothing’s happening, then nothing will happen. Overriding that decision is an exercise in futility. 

Now, all thanks to modern psychiatry, he can kiss all of his supposed mastered self-control goodbye. His hands clench at his sides but not in response to any sort of escalation.

He has half a mind to groan out in outright frustration, except that could only ever be misinterpreted. Ed must be getting physically tired. There is only so much stress a single forearm can take, he knows this. 

The decision to stop comes to him as soon as Ed’s own hardness can be felt against his upper thigh, proof of his accompanying arousal.

Roy reacts in a jiffy, sits up, loops an arm around Ed and flips them over, using the leverage he’d already gained by distracting him with an open-mouthed kiss. 

If it’s too desperate, Edward doesn’t call him out on it, rather lands face up against the floor with a low thump that’s cushioned by Roy’s arm and blinks at him in clipped astonishment. 

“Wh —” he starts right before Roy gets busy with planting a trail of kisses on the side of his jaw and down his neck. 

He feels Ed swallow before asking, “Did I fuck it up?” 

“What?” He straightens up enough to look down at him, managing not to pout at the way Ed’s eyes flood with honest regret and trepidation. 

“God — no.” He laughs, and it feels good, so he keeps going with the tone while elaborating further. “I just kept thinking of returning the favor and didn’t feel like waiting,” He smiles while he dips down to kiss whatever answer Ed was working on away. To wipe it out. To pray it into erasure. 

A few seconds pass like that until Ed’s breathing has caught up to the growingly rapid cadence Roy was expecting, along with the way he grips his shoulders. Roy’s hands never travel lower than the bottom of his ribcage, but it seems to be enough to get him going. He deems it appropriate to kiss his earlobe before asking. 

“Mind if I blow you?” Perhaps a little on the overused-side of salacious courting. But Ed’s grip goes deathly; a sharp gasp gets visibly stuck in his chest as if it were actually a hiss; he nearly shivers. 

Not having expected such a visceral response, Roy falters, but the intention is still settled inside him, only heightened by the awareness of just how much he actually wants to go through with it. If not for possible distraction’s sake, then at least for Ed, just because he genuinely deserves to feel good — and the thought of what he might sound like while being touched turns him on even more than what he thought was possible with this current medical impediment of his. 

Roy brushes his lips against the underside of his jaw for a second before dredging up the needed seriousness to look at him and get a better feel of his response.

“I…” Ed mouths after understanding that Roy’s tame smile was placed in waiting for his response. “I ah, I don’t — know — I mean. You — d’you want to?” He looks away. 

Roy feels the corners of his mouth pull further upwards without him meaning them to. 

“Uh — yes.” He enunciates the obviousness, smoothing its edges with the back of his fingers as they trail the side of Ed’s face in a feather-light caress. “I want to.” 

His thumb and pointer come to rest in his chin, and he gets the urge to tell him how pretty he is, yet there’s the distinct possibility that he might take it the wrong way — as a sort of mockery or condescension. He knows from experience that some guys don’t really warm up to the adjective, so he holds his tongue. This isn’t about embarrassing him in any way. 

Ed scans his face and looks like he’s about to speak before a harsh buzzing punctures the air and makes him flinch. He immediately shifts on his back to try and mask the jolt before reaching a hand down to his back pocket. 

“Sh-shit, sorry,” he mumbles as his eyes close in an annoyed type of lethargy. 

Roy gets the memo and sits back, giving him enough space to shimmy his phone out. “It’s alright,” He smiles. It really is, at least until something seems to shift out of place. 

He thinks it’s barely perceptible, what with the way Edward always sort of glares at his screen like he genuinely doesn’t understand it’s content and has half a mind to go toss it over the railroad tracks at any second, but the way his shoulders mildly tense while reading whatever message it is he got seems to be charged with foreboding. Overwhelmingly so. 

More than what simply reading into posture shifts like that could reveal. Roy doesn’t receive the message all that clearly, but he immediately becomes aware of it’s code. 

No more than an instant ticks by in silence. Roy sits back on his calves with his jeans pulled down to his knees and Ed sitting with his legs extended in front of him, staring at his phone as he parts his lips on a snipped breath.

“Ah — _fuck_ , I um.” He shifts his attention to make some fleeting eye contact. “I gotta — I gotta go.” 

“Everything alright?” Roy asks. 

“Yeah it’s just — it’s nothing,” he says while bending his knees and placing his feet under him to stand. He pointedly braces a hand against his right knee, like he sometimes does when getting up from the cafeteria benches — a deliberate, practiced sort of movement that sometimes elicits the faintest wince. 

Roy’s gaze follows his stance before his own body reacts. He blinks a couple of times before getting busy with pulling his pants back up. 

“CPS comes around once a month,” Ed suddenly blurts. Roy only pauses for the barest hint of a second while his fingers work on the metal button at the top. He resumes his movement, pulling the fly up while looking at his hands. 

He doesn’t think of asking what the acronym stands for, even before the bells on his mind start ringing with an urgent reminder. 

Ed takes a small breath before speaking up again. 

“They send this representative to check — like, check on us and shit. I forgot that was today and. Fuck. Yeah.” He chuckles while vaguely waving his fisted phone, even if the expression is kept light, his eyes go suddenly distant as he starts making his way to the door. 

It doesn’t escape his attention. This is the first time he’s ever told him anything related to his home life. Its — jarring, is what it is. 

“You need a ride?” he says while idly dusting his clothes once he’s up. 

“No,” Ed resolutely answers. 

“Al-right,” he settles for, instead. “I’ll — let me walk you out,” he words just as they reach his room’s entrance. He manages to out-walk Ed just in time to open the door for him, to which he reacts with a little hint of a smile, hands nervously refitting his black jacket even though he never even unbuttoned it. 

“Thanks,” he mumbles before making his way past in a growing hurry. By the time they reach the top of the stairs he’s positive Ed is shaking, although it’s hard to tell with the way both of them are set in constant motion. 

They’re a few steps shy from arriving at the first floor — which is technically the second, if Chris’ bar counts as the first, the one actually at street-level. He’s always let Ed in through their house’s official entrance, which is only a couple of brick steps off the sidewalk and gives way to the street parallel to the bar’s access. Most people usually can’t tell that it’s the same exact building, so it makes for some bewilderment on their part when he casually lets people know that he’s seen them around a lot. The element of surprise. 

He looks ahead at Ed and can’t stop himself from at least checking. “Are you sure you’re okay?” 

“I’m — yeah. M-my — my guardian just gets really pissed about it. When I forget.” They walk steadily down the stairs, a growing sense of urgency pushing Ed at least two steps ahead of him. “And I keep forgetting, so,” he chuckles again. Breathy. 

“Oh,” is really all Roy can think of offering. 

This information is not something he can process in a helpful manner — it’s simply not all that relatable. 

The tautness of his neck as Ed looks down at his moving feet and the brief stutter at the beginning of his phrase play a dissonant chord together, it spikes his awareness about something he hadn’t really cared to consider before, at least not when coexisting with Ed on a near-daily basis. 

It’s fear. The steps creak under their combined weight as they reach the bottom floor. 

He senses fear. 

His own stomach contracts when Ed all but stumbles out of his house once Roy pushes the spring-door open and sees him off. The tight-lipped smile he throws over his shoulder before disappearing around the corner gives him pause. 

Not for the first time Roy finds himself incessantly wondering about what Ed’s private life is really like, but on this particular instance, lingering on his entrance steps and letting the afternoon wind get under his shirt as he stares off into the empty street, that usual dose of curiosity is laced with a twinge of pointed bitterness he can’t for the life of him shake off, no matter how hard he tries to simply react and get himself back inside. 

He seemed a little too shaken for a kiss, but he should’ve at least given him a goodbye hug. The thought that he didn’t makes him deeply unsettled, for some reason. 

He finally manages to swallow once Valerie calls out for him in a note of uncertainty, probably wondering who’s letting the chilly draft in. He swallows, and his spit feels like acid. 

*

He told him to text when he got home, but no communications arrive. 

He thinks of waiting until darkness has enveloped every inch of the outside world not graced by the aligned yellow lamp posts in order to call — and does, but no one answers. He can’t concentrate on Ed’s voicemail beyond the fact that it’s a pile of seamless “I’m obviously not here; please fuck off; call me later”. He tries again before letting the night consume him without completion, falling into a restless sleep of half-formed dreams that don’t know if they’re actually memories or free-associating craziness. He pads down the stairs to drink about two and a half glasses of tap water while throwing the surface on which he found his parents’ pictures one or two dirty looks. The ratty album’s gone, Chris probably thought it best to hide it after his little display of possessed longing. 

He sighs, kills the lights and retreats back to his bedroom, wondering if Ed simply went to sleep early. 

When an entire Sunday goes by without him reaching out, Roy accepts that some distance is being called for, which is fine, but also leaves obscene quantities of food for thought out in the open. He nearly gives himself indigestion from wanting to prove just how much renewed preoccupation he’s capable of chewing through in one single sitting. 

“My — guardian — just gets really pissed about it…” 

He mouths the words to himself in silence and processes just how uncomfortable they make him feel. 

He can’t help but think that some of it, probably all of it, was effectively his fault. An overzealous boyfriend who can’t just leave him alone for a full weekend. Who can’t simply say ‘thank you’ and not pounce into his intimacy yet again like he can’t keep it in his pants for a second. 

He starts devising an apology while his knuckles crack and the skin on his lips obstinately finds its way between his unforgiving teeth every now and then. It’s a terrible habit that only ever succeeds in drawing blood and leaving some red splotches behind. It’s unhealthy. 

It also irks Chris to unexplainable extents. 

As a gesture primarily born out of anxiety, he used to do it a lot as a kid. He only stopped because it earned him these essentially harmless but nonetheless jarring slaps in the mouth delivered by her firm hand and accompanied by the age-old warning ‘ _If you want to hurt yourself over nothing, just come to me and I’ll show you some worthwhile pain_ ’. At the moment he can’t help the urge to bite into his own supple flesh, and thinks that still now it’d earn him the same type of punishment.

Little kid mannerisms get him little kid treatment. Chris has always been clear on that. He snorts at his empty bedroom, at the unfinished history homework that sits on his desk. 

The anxiety fuels him past the couple of blinding hours that stand between him and yet another Monday morning, where the mere sight of Ed walking up the main steps makes his heart want to jump out through his mouth, so he shuts it tight and turns his teeth into a barrier to prevent it from falling out, at least until he reaches out to him and has to actually form some words.

“I was just worried,” he admits when Ed fleetingly apologizes with his hands tucked under his armpits. He seems to be authentically cold today. “I’m sorry I made you late,” Roy tells him. 

“Don’t be — it was fine.” Ed promptly cuts into the beginning of the prepared, longer version of his apology with an earnest look. “It’s just some red tape bullshit, it’s pretty boring,” he sniffles. 

For some reason Roy doesn’t want to think of as a sixth sense — because then his doctor, ever a monetizing professional, would really bring out the big prescription-guns and tell him something about existing within the schizo-affective specter of whatever and Chris would tense her jaw and silently cry during the car-ride back home, not actually letting any tears fall from her glassy eyes while she shakes her head in something that looks like disappointment, but really isn’t —, he can practically _feel_ the lie, but he resolves to not say anything, rather content with the gratifying way in which Ed leans into him as he surrounds his shoulder and they walk to class together, like they now usually do. 

“It’s Fuery’s birthday this week,” he tells him once the information — long since buried under the unmanageable weight of his usual, mindless, dejected weekend spiraling — pops back into his mind like the sparkling detail that it is. 

Their shared warmth contributes a considerable ton to regulate his previously erratic heartbeat and he feels himself take a contented breath. Maybe someone had reminded him of the upcoming date. Havoc or Riza or a Facebook alarm, telling him all about what he was getting up to an exact year ago, today. Nothing much. He’d gone down on a girl who was on the last of her period and then got tagged in a picture of him and some other guys from the team, standing around as they waited for something — he doesn’t remember what he was looking at with such intent from where he sat on a bench next to three other people with his cheek rested on his palm. 

Maybe someone had called or texted or knocked on his window with a dusty pebble. Who knows. He doesn’t really remember the last time he talked to Riza — but they _have_ been seeing each other, it’s probably happened even if he can’t recall. 

“Oh yeah?” Ed says, snatching his attention back to his moving lips and yellow eyelashes. He hasn’t uncrossed his arms to return the embrace, like he almost never does. The way his head sort of leans against Roy’s collarbone seems to be his way of reciprocating contact. “You finally gonna pay him back with interest and shit?” he jabs in reference to the terrible, ongoing debt that he keeps forgetting to reimburse. 

Roy contemplates for a second. “Maybe. Maybe not. I am a terrible friend, you know.” 

“Damn.”

“He mostly sticks with me out of fear and the sense that we’ve known each other for so long that we could call each other family at this point.”

“Kindergarten?”

“Second grade.” They round a corner and it doesn’t escape his attention that people split to either side of the corridor as they make their way past. 

It’s not that he’s trying to impose or some petty teenage lunacy of the sort. Perhaps this town’s predominantly Christian enough to think sexual orientation is actually contagious. He hopes it is. Bisexuality is underrated because everyone thinks it’s made up. 

Maybe he’s been transgressive enough to be scary — hell, he doesn’t actually care. It always feels transcendent to give people something to fret over, to be angry about, to gush and gossip. If he spares himself even just a few minutes to consider seeing himself through other people’s eyes, he can even begin to sink into the illusion of actually being this mighty, cunning, energetic and put-together individual that they make him out to be. It never lasts, but for a few moments there, it’s relieving. 

Ed doesn’t like it, he knows that much. It visibly churns his stomach and weighs on him like some sort of medieval torture device made to crush people’s skulls — so it can at least be said that he isn’t doing it on purpose. 

Ed makes a sound of amazement. “Then you’ve really gotta pay him,” he says. 

“Come to his birthday party and find out if I’ll go through with it,” he says, looking down at him. Ed frowns and he knows better, now, than to try and smooth out the crease between his eyebrows with an unwelcome thumb. It doesn’t mean he doesn’t want to do it, still. 

“On a weeknight?”

“Why not?” Roy tries shrugging off the tingling discomfort of self-loathing. He thinks of kissing his cheek, of playing with his hair, of being unmanageable and intrusive and why is he having so many of these thoughts? Why can’t he seem to stop them, whenever he is aware of what he’s doing? “Half the people already use their desks as napping cots — teachers included,” he manages to retain a casual tone. 

“I guess,” Ed snorts. 

“Come on, it’ll be fun.” He gently squeezes his arm, which turns out to be more of a calming strategy for himself. Ed doesn’t seem to mind it, but he does grumble something inaudible under his breath.

“Huh?”

“Nothing,” he sighs. “I was gonna say I’m technically under curfew during the week —”

“Oh,” his genius of a mind offers. 

“— No, but.” He swallows, then shakes his head. “It’s like. Whatever. She doesn’t actually check that I’m there, or anything,” 

The phrase grows quieter with each word until it’s nothing but a discreet afterthought of a mumble, yet he still catches all of. Roy clamps down on the question about who the hell is ‘she’, maybe because something about how melancholic that scenario sounds is immediately more attention-grabbing. 

The disquiet he felt over the weekend makes a reappearance through such a thought-provoking sentence. He knows Ed probably didn’t want it to come out like that, but as it stands, most of what he says overflows with unintentional meaning Roy is quite clearly too inept to comprehend. 

A guardian’s strict authority. Monthly, obligated, stress-inducing meetings. Being ignored aside from his dutiful compliance to certain rules. 

Maybe ‘melancholic’ isn’t the right word, so much as… Solitary. Hostile. Lonely. 

Somehow it hadn’t occurred to him how achingly alienating his very day-to-day must be, surrounded by all this normalcy and the overwhelming zeal of the happy-go-lucky high-school experience most people take for granted. He sees him going home in the evenings with the objective of staying out of people’s way after yet another long day of fulfilling everyone’s expectations as a scientific prodigy, as well as filling in hours of labor to provide for himself. 

He’s got a particular character to him (which Roy just happens to be enamored by), sure, but in many ways, Roy is impressed he isn’t even _more_ antisocial, jumpy, insecure, vexed. 

Roy bites his inner cheek while sneaking a glance at him. 

Considering the apparent aseptic nature of Ed’s assigned caretaker, he hadn’t realized just how naïve it’d been of him to assume foster care implied any dose of genuine love and affection. He doesn’t think it’s impossible, of course, for something like that to arise from such a dynamic, but the more details about Ed’s private life that start clicking into place, the more he’s convinced that that certainly isn’t the case for him. He can say what he will about Chris’s methods, but he’s never doubted how much she cares. Maybe that’s all that privilege truly means. 

Much to his own dismay, Mr. Hughes’ words resonate with truthfulness now more than ever. Circumstances haven’t been kind to Ed. The knowledge sinks into him with heaviness, but all that it manages is making him slightly lean into Ed’s own stance — and he is, to the surprise of no-one, absolutely steady. 

“Hm,” he finally hums against the top of Ed’s head, deciding if there’s ever a time to pursue that particular topic, now isn’t it. “Well, there you go. I can pick you up from work so you don’t walk in the dark.” 

“Oh no,” Ed deadpans, but Roy can hear the backdrop smile. “Whatever would I do without you, kind sire.” 

Roy permits himself to grin. “Chewed on by a lava-sneezing dragon, maybe.”

Ed hums as they arrive at the classroom’s semi-crowded entrance. “Could be worse.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ps. Roy Mustang Does Not Have A Manic Personality Who Even Told You That
> 
> ps II. this chapter is so fucking long dude I'm gonna cry
> 
> ps III. it might take a while longer, this time, before part 14 is ready due to my life's chores (please never work and study, take proper care of yourself!), but since I'm planning for that chapter to be the most packed with major plot points, I do hope it'll be worth the wait. either way, if anyone wants to hmu in the meantime I am totally dtc (this means Down to Clown, according to me, not Dynamic Traction Control), my messagebox is always open for anything, hell u guys can get a dvd commentary on whatever you want from this fic to make up for the wait (I've asked that of other fic writers once or twice and it's hella fun).

**Author's Note:**

> [tumblr](https://belalugoosi.tumblr.com/)


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